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MADHUSUDAN THAKUR (1932-2022)
Madhusudan Thakur was a teacher and author whose life spanned two worlds, as a professor of English literature and also the product of a traditional, Maithili Brahman background with a superb knowledge of India's central religious tradition. This page makes available both his autobiography, Myself Surprised, published a few months before his death, and also reminscences contributed by several of his many friends and presented to him in 2021 as a birthday tribute. A list of his own publications is provided at the floot of the page.
| myself_surprised.pdf |
IN THE WORDS OF FRIENDS: TRIBUTES COLLECTED AT THE START OF HIS NINETIETH YEAR
1.Memories of Madhu
Ramesh Shrestha
It was from Ajit K Mishra that I first heard about Prof Madhusudan Thakur.
“It’s not me, not me but the wind that blows against me,” Mishra Sir apologized each time he was late for his afternoon classes on “American Literature,” having taken a bus like all of us did from Ratna Park, near Tri-Chandra Campus, where he was also teaching. He was from Bhagalpur University, Bihar and had come to Nepal as a Colombo Plan professor.
Dr Mishra used to invite us to visit him some weekends to his rented place in Naxal. Sometimes he would “tutor” us by giving writing assignments during our Final MA year (1971) on topics like pessimism in Thomas Hardy’s novels or an analysis of the mid-night reveries of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James - and so on and so forth.
I would go to the university library, where I worked as a head clerk, across from the Boys’ Hostel, where I stayed, and put together an essay (with passages lifted largely from critics like Sir David Cecil, Harold Bloom etc.) and promptly turned up at Dr. Mishra’s place the following Saturday, when his kind and tall wife unfailingly served tea with finger biscuits first thing. Mishra Sir would then go over my last week’s assignment with me and write his comments in nice blue ink I still remember.
It was from Ajit K Mishra that I first heard about Prof Madhusudan Thakur.
He talked about him as someone who had come to Kathmandu like himself as a Colombo
Plan professor but afterwards had dropped out from the academic world and started pursuing an alternative lifestyle in Kathmandu spending his time often with the young hippies and local literati.
Mishra Sir told us what a brilliant family the erstwhile professor came from – his brother Damodar Thakur was a Professor at Delhi University; another brother a popular journalist who had written All the Prime Minister’s Men and so on.
`Why would a brilliant professor just give up his career and live like a hippie?’ I asked. `Find him on New Road and ask him’, Mishra sir encouragingly replied.
Meeting on New Road
And that’s what AbhiSubedi, one of my soul mates then (and now), and I did when we saw him one afternoononNew Road under where else but the Pipul Tree.
“Aren’t you Prof Madhusudan Thakur,” we must have asked him. We then invited him for a cup of tea at the tea shop across the road. There used to be more tea shops, coffee houses and betel shops those days on New Road than today.
I think we probably started off by calling him Prof Thakur or Guru. `Call me Madhu’, he said. We found him friendly and easy to talk to.
During our tea and cigarettes, I took out from my pocket my new poem “To My 23rd Year”:
Now hold on to time
And walk gently into the timeless
Rough-shod into the spaceless.
Sweet time stop softly
Till I end this journey
Rough-shod was Madhu’s hand-written addition to the poem. I’m pretty sure the day was 4th of May 1973.
We started meeting Madhu regularly on New Road, that’s where everybody met everybody those days. You went and stood under the Pipul Tree – sometimes got your shoes shined. And very soon Abhi would turn up and also TulsiDiwas, Upendra Shrestha, RochakGhimire, Vijaya Malla, Shailendra Saakar - all the shakers and movers of the Nepali literary scene: poets and poetasters, publishers, news reporters, proof readers, students, professors, singers, coffee house intellectuals of all climes and colors.
Besides New Road, Sarala Bajracharya’shome comes to mind as another place for our rendezvous with Madhu. Sarala, who had spent a few years in Russia learning Russian language and culture, had been a long-time friend of Madhu. Her three-story white house was near New Road in Basantapur opposite Hanuman Dhoka right next to right next to what used to be known as Freak Street, where all the hippies found their home.
Bhimsenthandays
Freak Street was right next to Bhimsenthan where Saket Thakur and I rented a one-room apartment. Finding once that Madhu was looking for a place to stay, I invited him to join us. Madhu soon moved in with all his belongings in one tin trunk. Now we had three beds in one room but it was no problem as we were easy-going and enjoyed Madhu’s own easy ways. We had a separate kitchen for our lady cook to concoct our low-cost dal-bhat-tarkari meal twice a day.
Actually, this Bhimsenthan dera was rented by Saket for himself first but I liked the place when he invited me to visit. I thought the room looked nice and big enough to easily accommodate two. I asked if I could move in and was accepted.
Now I had invited a third person and it was great of Saket to accept another Thakur to cram the place even further.
Now Madhu is going to start his 90th year this October. I turned 72 by Nepali reckoningjust this April. So, the 18 years gap between the two of us now seems huge.
But I don’t think the gap existed then. We were all young - I was 23; Saket 30 and Madhu 41.Our world then was definitely young with all its inhabitants even younger than they are now. At the same time, having older people around me was no problem for me as everybody was older than me come to think of it: besides Saket, Nirmal Tuladhar, and Abhi, here I’m thinking of Chaitanya Upadhaya, Krishna Gurung and Peter Karthak– the last three having already and very sadly departed ahead of us.
Being the youngest I was often the most lost: I found in Madhu a kindred spirit, sympathetic companionship. In a way he was like my intellectual, moral, spiritual guide, helping me to navigate through my days of growing up!
Our place in Bhimsenthan was small but was enough to hold parties, lots and lots of them. Often with lots of local rakshi booze with friends sometime spending the night there. Saket was exquisitely skilled in rolling joints, blending tobacco with cannabis grass and charas lovingly on the palm of his hand.
The following lines from Peter Karthak’s poem will add to the picture:
To Madhusudan Thakur
What are you going to tell me next?
“Insecurity is the price of freedom.”
What now?
That insecurity is your bliss
And that you were made for it?
Peter was so intrigued that Madhu also provided the model for the Indian Intelligence officer in his award-winning novel Pratyek Thaun Pratyek Manche (published in English as Every Place, Every Person: a Himalayan Tale from Darjeeling[1])
To Ashram Singhawara:kitne log so rahehai
It was I think still 1973, the beginning of winter vacation at Patan College, where Abhi and I were both teaching English (Peter Karthak was doing the same at a nearby Engineering campus), when Madhu invited us to his Ashram Singhwara.
We accepted gladly as it’d be handy to take train again and go meet Peter visiting his home town of Darjeeling.
Three of us then took a bus down the narrow Tribhuvan Rajpath to Birgunj, the only road out of Kathmandu to the Terai available then. From Birgunj we took a rickshaw and tanga horse cart across the Indian border to the rail-head town of Raxaul for a whole-night train ride to Darbhanga.
We got to Darbhanga when the morning was just breaking.
Madhu is lying down on one of the benches. We’re in a third-class compartment
“It’s morning time already. Get up. Subha ho gaya Utho Uth,” says an Indian passenger trying to wake us up.
Madhu seems to be annoyed at the guy bothering us:.
Chalo aapko dekhadunga abhi kitne log so rahe hai.
`Let’s go, I’ll show you how many people are still asleep,`Madhu told the passenger, who looked like no more than a gentle farmer and so seemed quite lost at the reaction.
Madhu had just uttered a mantra that Abhi and I have been using all our life since then: kitne log so rahe hai.
A couple of hours’ bus ride took us finally to Ashram Singhwara, a nice, quiet rural hideaway Madhu had created for himself and his friends at the village where he was born. Besides his ageing mother, I remember meeting a fisherman who in the morning brought fresh toddy from a palm tree. This fermented all day and provided us with our sundowner every evening.
I think the following extract from one of the letters Madhu wrote to me around this time nicely describes his approach to Ashram Singhwara:
“And so the pilgrimage goes on and a strange grace continues to shower in a nonstop steady fashion that intrigues me too: the meaning of all this constitutes my life and I daren’t question it too closely lest it all wither in my hands- it’s enough to let it flower! It’s pretty agonizing to look at it all from the other end and ask the meaning of my life and where it’s leading, where it’ll all end, which I do sometimes in the stillness of my own self, but it does not matter since it’s always fulfilling in a strange unexplainable way. In the process, a rich and varied relationship with Nepal is growing all the time and I already have what you call “two worlds to work on.” Someday I might perhaps have enough leisure to make this concrete, give it a “local habitation and a name” for us all.
Ashram Singhawara proved to be popular among many of his friends. Among mutual friends who found their way there were John Whelpton and Durga Pokhrel.
Abhi and I left the Ashram on the same bus that had brought us from Darbhanga. I can still hear the plaintive honking of the bus from miles away as we waited for it.
Without Madhu, Darbhanga to Siliguri was an uneventful train ride. From Siliguri we shared a taxi to Darjeeling with two garrulous Bengali boys. Darjeeling was cold and under the mist most days. Peter introduced us to our first beef sukuti and tomba, millet beer. He took us to meet famous local litterateurs Raj Narain Pradhan and Lakkhi Devi Sundas. Sadly, not Indra Bahadur Rai, I don’t remember why.
DhulikhelSvaha
Back from Darjeeling, the year 1974 started with a very badly planned trip to Dhulikhel, which Madhu also joined. As usual, our Dhulikhel friend Hari Bhakta Khoju was the chief host. Joining in the day out were Saket, and the late Dr Mishra - he was a homeopathic doctor and when he laughed the whole world laughed with him. As we were short of rupees as usual, we couldn’t afford to stay at the Dhulikhel Lodge, the town’s first hotel Bel Prasad had opened just a year or so before. So, Hari Bhakta took us to spend the night at a high school just above the football ground. It was a cold wintry night so we made a bonfire with wood/dry bamboo stolen from a nearby farm wall (for which Hari Bhakta got squarely chided next day by the owner who happened to be his relative).
Why this story? Just to remember that Madhu was the one doing the fire sermon “ Ommunimunimahamuniyaswaha” chanting Sanskrit slokas around the fireplace through the night.
Out of Asia
Nineteen Seventy-Four was also the year I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to do my Master’s in Linguistics at Michigan State, East Lansing. In the world we lived then everybody met and recommended their friends. Thus, Madhu recommended, nay arranged for me to stop on the way to Michigan in Germany and meet one of his young friends, Ute Johanna Mayer, and her family. Madhu had then many friends, devotees and admirers throughout Europe and North America.
For someone like me who had never seen a jumbo jet, a smart thing, thinking back today, would have been just to fly straight to East Lansing on the PanAm 101 flight ticket I was given. But I also was ready to face the world.
Soon I got an aerogramme from Ute confirming the invitation. All I had to do after I got off the plane in Frankfurt was to call her to let her know I had arrived, then wait for her at the airport coffee shop where she would come and pick me up.
But for someone who had never seen a public telephone booth (Kathmandu did not have a public phone service then) trying to make that important call from an airport seemed likely to be as disorganized as our trip to Dhulikhel. How did a public phone operate?
But in those days, none of that mattered and a guardian angel seemed to always hover around your shoulders.
It just happened that I was sitting next to an American young man who had just finished his Peace Corps volunteer stint in Nepal and was on his way home. And I think he realized the horror of my situation when I told him about my plan in the city. He swung into action – came out of the plane with me, made the call, connected me with Ute.
But he was not there to help me deposit my suitcase in a coin-operated left luggage box. At the coffee shop, the milk for my coffee came from a sachet and the sugar from a bottle dispenser – very confusing. Life was getting to be so stressful.
But Ute came promptly as promised and took me by train to her house in Kalkheim, Taunus. I had never met a mother so spiritually enlightened. With her brother Wolf and his friends, I sampled my first home-made red wine.
Just as Madhu loomed large this way in the beginning of my trip to America, he appeared on the scene when I was finishing my scholarship run of two years.
It all started with our mutual friend Krishna Gurung (RIP) stopping over for a visit in East Lansing and both of us deciding to go and meet Madhu who had then also been visiting his own friend in Ontario, Canada. Krishna had just finished his two-year graduate degree in TOEFL at the University of Hawaii Moana campus under an East-West Center scholarship grant.
Our historic meeting with Madhu and his friend Daniel Sokoloski took place on the American side of the Niagara Falls on the day after the 4th of July 1976 – that is a day after the Bicentennial American Day of Independence, which Krishna and I had celebrated by bivouacking in the park, all the town’s motel rooms having been fully booked for the holiday week end.
When I came back to Nepal, Madhu had started working as a lecturer at TU. He had gone back to the same profession he was in when he first came to Nepal – teaching. I emigrated to Thailand in 1980 and so met him only sporadically when I visited Nepal. We had completely lost touch until a few years ago when John Whelpton found him alive and well in New Delhi. We happily continue to connect on e-mail.
Being able to reminisce about things spanning over half a century among friends still living is a great privilege. Long Live Madhu and the same for all of us!
2. Madhusudan Thakur: friend and guru
AbhiSubedi
Some people who knew Murari Madhusudan Thakur (MM Thakur) had told me stories about him before I met him in person for the first time on Kathmandu’s New Road one afternoon. Ramesh Shrestha and I met him together. I forgot the exact year and month; I think it was a sunny day in the winter of 1972. People portrayed Madhu as a flaneur, a freak and a yogi who had many friends among the foreigners and the natives in Kathmandu. We addressed him as Madhu after we became familiar. Madhu's visit to Kathmandu coincided with the visits of freaks and wanderers mainly from the Western countries; they were also called hippies. Later when I became friends with them I discovered that most of them were not happy with theterm 'hippie'. In retrospect, I feel I had made a picture of Madhu as a different kind of hippie, an erstwhile academic who had also taught English literature at Tri-Chandra College (TC)in Kathmandu. Madhu was one of those English teachers who had come hereto teach for a fixed period of time at various colleges under what was called the Colombo Plan.Madhu's elder brother Damodar Thakur, whom I never met, had also taught at TC. Four other 'Colombo Plan' teachers also taught meat the M.A. English class in Kirtipur. Madhu had already left Nepal before I joined the class in 1967.
I had made a picture of Madhu in my mind--a scholar of free spirit with a unique and distinct modus vivendi, and a philosopher from this part of the world who was out in search of new meanings and values in life.I had already made friends with some hippies when I met Madhu. So it was both a challenge and a source of excitement to meet Madhu himself. In retrospect, I feel I had somehow conjured up a similar picture of Madhuto the one spelt out in the following remarks by a hippie and scholar named Michael Hollingshead: "I told Madhu that I thought we were all on some kind of sort of [sic] quest and had found in Kathmandu the perfect place to start. Kathmandu was a city of refugees, the New Jerusalem of the Sadhakas, who had come to savour of the fruits of Paradise."(The Man 124-125). Madhu was not a typical sadhaka or a 'refugee' and certainly not one who had come to Kathmandu to 'savour the fruits of Paradise'. But Madhu had full sympathy with those who had come to Kathmandu in the spirit Hollingshead described.I always felt that Madhu had something to explain to these visitors. They looked to him for that. That's why Madhu made some good friends among them.
I felt Madhu would be a good bridge and an interpreter for us also. My understanding was that Madhu had this ability as someone who was already exposed to the metropolitan culture and had educational experience in Canada. For this reason also I very much wanted to meet him. Ramesh also wanted to meet him, I guess, for more or less the same reasons. As I said, one winter afternoon Ramesh and I went to the New Road addaa, the shade of an old peepul tree that still stands there, to take a chance to meet Madhu.And we did indeed meet him. The thrill I felt from this meeting still remains deep down in me. It is the subject of a longer personal essay. Here I would like to recall our distinct, first image of Madhu. He walked there just like any other visitor. He was wearing a reddish thick woollen jacket, and had neatly combed his long somewhat unctuous hair behind. He had a beard and wore thick glasses.
Madhu's image that we conjured up initially remained until later times. I have some textual evidence for that. Ramesh Shrestha, the late Peter Karthak and I wrote poems in English, which we eventually published in the late seventies in an anthology entitled Manas (1977) after the name Manasarovara. The senior artist Uttam Nepali who passed away this year (2021) made a very nice cover for that. I am alluding to one of my poems in that collection that I had written after seeing Madhu's Ashram in a village named Singhwara in Darbhanga district of Bihar. Ramesh and I decided to join Peter Karthak who was going home to Darjeeling, and Madhu who was going to Singhwara. That must have been in 1973. We visited Madhu's village as our first goal. We travelled by train. I still remember one small but very interesting incident that happened inside the train at night. One passenger who had wanted to lie down for a while and take a nap found us in his way. He made a gentle protest. Madhu replied to him in Hindi with a question--abhi kitne log so rahe hae, tumko malum hae? Or 'do you know how many people are sleeping right now?' The point was difficult for this man to grasp. He kept quiet.
We reached Singhwara in the morning. I was moved to see the simple, calm and inspiring centre of Madhu’s life there. The sight of the ancient green trees, attractive country houses and a creek beside the Ashram impressed me so much that I spontaneously composed a poem then and there and titled it "Ashram Singhwara". I want to quote the last stanza:
As for you,
When you come here
If the river, the chirping of birds
And the sound of deep silence
Do chime with the Professor's tidal ripples
With his smiling face,
And if you grasp the sonata
You may think
That the Ashram Singhwara has at long last come up.
That was my quest, my way of understanding Madhu, who remembers that incident in these words in his unpublished memoirs that I cannot resist the temptation of quoting with due apologies: "One of them was so moved by the atmosphere on arrival there that he wanted to write immediately on it. The lines that he was moved to write then became a memorable witness to the Ashram at Singhwara". My feeling is that we had created an image of Madhu as someone very close to us.Yet we maintained also a distinct image of him as a guru, and a creative freak who we valued as a bridge to a wider world. We needed him somehow for our own complex, personal reasons.
Madhu published a review of our anthology in the October 6, 1980 edition of a Kathmandu newspaper, The Commoner (October 6, 1980), under the title "Manas: An Evaluation". This review shows Madhu’s rare insight into our poetry, our dreams and us ourselves. Madhu has so far not written much else about us, not even in his as yet unpublished memoirs. Without mentioning Ramesh’s name or mine, hehas, however, penned these words that I want to cite from his text, again with due apologies:
"This was the beginning of a long friendship with the young people which grew close as time passed. I learnt that they had been students of English at Tribhuvan University, had missed being my students by several years during my Colombo Plan assignment in the early to mid 1960s. … I left in 1965. But even more importantly, they both wrote poetry in Nepali and occasionally tried their hand at writing in English".
Madhudescribes us and our quest in Manas as follows: "As the remarks on the back cover seem to indicate, their coming out together does not owe itself to a mere coincidence; they share certain attitudes and speak from a common stance, owing allegiance to certain values held in common. This is exactly what Manas is intended to represent."(Madhu, "Manas: An Evaluation"). Madhu portrays Ramesh and me as youths whose anxiety about the Manas quest was similar; and Peter with his style of quest characterised by his rather extrovert and 'easy-going' nature was a little different from us. Madhu cites our poems to make his point. Evoking the spirit of Mansarovar,Madhu adds, "The poems collected here are a gift offering to this Mansarovarness of Kathmandu, in celebration, an invocation of the self-same spirit inherent in this ancient city...". Interestingly, Madhu's observation echoes Hollingshead's remarks (quoted above) about Kathmandu being a place for the sadhakas. This is a very eloquent comparison.
In Kathmandu Madhu remained active as a seeker and writer. He moved like a sadhaka and a person who socialised with both the natives and the foreigners here. He wrote essays about such experiences, and compiled them in a collection that was published by his friend Uttam Kunwar, under the title Nepal: a miscellany (1975). He was working on his next collection of philosophical essays when he came to Kathmandu again and discussed them with us. Later they were published in India under the title Thus Spake Bhisma. (1992). He worked on a collection of Laxmi Prasad Devkota's poems and got it published in Kathmandu. I know Madhu has written other books that are published in India. Those I know are the poems of Nirala and the compilation of translated Maithili stories.There may me more, but I have no information about them.
One short essay cannot cover our long friendship and association with Madhu. At one point I played a role in bringing Madhu to teach with us at the Central Department of English in Kirtipur of Tribhuvan University. For me, those were great few years of working together with Madhu. But more important than that was Madhu's close association with Kathmandu, the people he knew before we met him and those who were our common friends. He had friends across the generations and disciplines both in Nepal and outside. He maintained his contact with people from abroad, especially those 'sadhakas' who visited Kathmandu at different times. Our long friendship remains strong even today though we have not physically met Madhu for many years. John Whelpton met him not so long ago on a research visit to Delhi. Peter Karthak passed away a few years ago. I wish he were here writing like us some words of tribute on the occasion of Madhu's ninetieth birthday that falls on October 15,2021. Happy Birthday, dear Madhu, friend and Guru!
References
Hollingshead, Michael. (1973) The Man Who Turned on the World.London: Bond and Briggs.
Available athttp://docshare01.docshare.tips/files/22594/225944737.pdf
Shrestha, Ramesh, AbhiSubedi, Peter Karthak. (1977). Manas.Kathmandu: RAP.
Thakur, M.M. (1975). Nepal: A Miscellany. Kathmandu: UttamKunwar.
Thakur, M.M. (1980, October 6). "Manas: An Evaluation". The Commoner. Kathmandu: The Commoner Pvt. Ltd.
Thakur, M.M. (1988). Selected Poems by Laxmi Prasad Devkota.Second edition. Kathmandu: Sandesh Griha.
Thakur, M.M. (1992).Thus SpakeBhisma. Delhi: Motilalbanarsidas.
3. Prof.Murari Madhusudan Thakur aka Madhu
NirmalTuladhar
Prologue to my first meeting with Madhu
After my SLC in 1964, I enrolled for the Intermediate of Arts (IA) in Tri-Chandra College (TC). My elective subjects were Special English, Psychology and Civics out of the following subjects that carried two papers with 200 marks:
Special English
Psychology
Civics
Logic
Mathematics
Economics
History
In addition to the above-stated subjects, there were compulsory English (200 marks) andVernacular languages (100 marks), the latter including 50 for compulsory Nepali and 50forNewaror Maithili or English. I chose English. Intermediate of Arts (IA) was a kind of liberal arts course, which comprised two years of schooling. In the full university sequence, IA took up the first year and second year, Bachelor of Arts (BA), which was also a liberal arts course, the third and fourth, and Master of Arts (MA) the fifth and sixth. After SLC (ten years of schooling), it required an additional6 years of education to obtain an MA degree. This was the higher education system prior to the introduction of the National Education System Plan in 1971.
Special English and Psychology were new elective courses, only introduced in 1964, so there was no classroom available for Special English at the TC building. So the class for Special English was held at the science block recently built next to the Saraswoti Sadan. For the first time I noticed the classrooms for science were different from the ones in the main building of TC. The science classroom had desks and benches that were arranged in a gallery-like or theatre-like style. In other words, desks and benches were in tiers. A teacher’s desk was on the ground. Students cast their gaze down to teachers. And they look up to students on the higher benches. The classrooms at the TC building have desks on daises for teachers. Students sit on benches and desks at ground level while the teachers sit at a desk on the dais. Here students look up at teachers, and the teachers look down at students. This was a basic difference between arts and science classrooms.
My first sighting of Prof. Madhusudan Thakur in 1964
Prof. Madhusudan Thakur made an entry into the science classroom to teach a poem from Poet’s Lips. Bespectacled and clad in a brownish corduroy jacket and with a deep, impressive voice (bulanda), he read out one of the romantic poems from Poet’s Lips. He asked us what the poem was about. One of my classmates, Madhu Shumshere J.B. Rana, said it was a romantic poem. Rana was a drop-out from St. Xavier’s School. No doubt, he spoke far better English than we. This was my first memory of seeing Prof. Thakur. Later we came to know he was a Colombo Plan Professor and he also taught MA students at Tribhuvan University inTripureshwor.
My second hearing of Prof. Madhusudan Thakur in 1972
To the best of my memory, this must be the period when I was doing my master’s in Linguistics by dissertation – the first and last program jointly run by the Institute for Nepal and Asian Studies (now the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS)) and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in 1972 -74.
There was an evening gathering as usual in Abhi’s rented room at Bangemudā behind Prof. K.P. Malla’s house before he moved to the room opposite Malla’s house. All of a sudden a familiar voice hit my ears. That bulanda voice I had heard in 1964 turned out to be that of Prof. Madhusudan Thakur. After that I would often find him among my friends – Abhi, Ramesh, Thakur, Peter and Krishna Gurung. I started seeing him more often in Thakur and Ramesh’s room in Bhimsenthān later. Then Prof. Madhusudan Thakur became familiar enough to be Madhu for me.
Madhu is near-sighted, he wears glasses with high prescription. In the early 1970’s our optical shop, Nisika Opticals, was at Takshay Baha near the Grand Wool Centre, and he would often drop by in the evening when I was looking after the shop during my father’s tea break. One evening Ms. Brown Bledsoe, an undergraduate affiliate at CNAS, TU, was at my shop, and Madhu stopped by as usual. I think I introduced her to him or the other way round. She was working on Newar jewelry for her undergraduate thesis. We were chit-chatting about whether boys piercedtheir ears to wear earrings. I was saying Newar boys did and showing my own pierced lobe. Then and there he got to his feet and came over to me to show his pierced lobe. Perhaps he was not happy with what I said. What he meant to say was thatit was not just Newar boys who wear earrings, the Indian boys also do. Currently Brown Bledsoe, Ph.D., is Curator of the South Asian Collection, Cornell University Library.
In early 1990s one day while I was going along the footpath on the way to Mandala Book Point I suddenly bumped into Prof. Thakur. He was well dressed as before in 1964 when he was a Colombo Plan Professor. We gave each other a big hug. He said, ‘Nirmal, I will be coming back again soon with a big bang.’ Asked where he was staying, he said in Hotel Vajra and he was writing a book. When I told Abhi about my sudden running into Prof. Thakur, he said Madhu had got a project from the B.P. Koirala India-Nepal Foundation, which brought him to Kathmandu. One evening he came over to my optical shop, Optical Zone, at Bishal Bazar for a new pair of glasses.
Again in1992 Madhu came over to see me at CNAS.Prof.Durga Prasad Bhandari was Executive Director. He was carrying a dust jacket of Thus SpakeBhīṣma. He told me it was his own book recently published but that he had not brought the book itself. He wanted me to postthe dust jacket on the display board in the lobby, which I happily did.
On October 22, 2005 I was attending a training program on ‘Dispensing Progressive Additional Lenses’ organized by Essilor India Pvt. Ltd. at Hotel Annapurna. My Nokia buzzed and I took a call. It was my mother who was calling to say my friend had come to see me. I told her to give the phone to him. Oh, it was Madhu. He said he wanted to see me. I said I was at the programme. He sounded as ifhe wanted to see me as soon as possible. Then I said he could comeover to Hotel Annapurna during the lunch break, and I would be waiting for him in the lobby. He showed up. He looked like the Madhusudan Thakur of 1972. We shook hands. He told my mother had served him tea and biscuits. Then he said he wanted a new pair of glasses as the ones he was wearing were too old. I asked him to come over to my shop the following day. He did that, and I tested his vision. There was a change in prescription from what he was wearing. I made a new pair of glasses for him. This was the last time I saw him.
Frankly speaking, my association with Madhu was basically a teacher-student one but since the 1970s it has been a friendship.
4. Memories of Madhu
John Whelpton
I first met Madhusudan Thakur in spring 1973 in Kathmandu’s Bhimsenthan tol. Marilyn Francis, a fellow British VSO,[2] had told me that an Indian guru was staying with a mutual friend, Ramesh Shrestha. My abiding memory of our meeting is of Madhu sitting cross-legged against the wall of Ramesh’s dera and saying `We are all one!’
Both Madhu and some of my Nepali friends had been attracted by aspects of the counter-culture that flourished in Kathmandu during the `Hippy Era’ of the 1960s and early 70s.[3] Madhu himself had taken the decision to abandon a conventional academic career and live the life of a brahmacharya without going through the householder stage. I was rather less enthusiastic about the `Hippy Era’ but found Madhu a very interesting character, with a deep knowledge of both the ancient Indian tradition, on which he had lectured at McMaster’s University in Canada, and of English literature, which he had originally come to Kathmandu to teach as a Colombo Plan lecturer with Tribhuvan University in the mid-1960s. We became good friends during my initial two years in Kathmandu and have kept in contact ever since.
In summer 1974 the absorption of Sikkim into the Indian Union prompted anti-Indian demonstrations on the Kathmandu streets. Madhu was then staying with me and I was walking with him in the centre of town when one such protest broke out. He encouraged me to mount the bicycle I was wheeling alongside me and ride off to investigate. Nationalist anger was unfortunately directed not only against the Indian government but also against ordinary Indian residents, with students banging on the roof of a car with Sikh occupants and chanting `Dhotiwalla murdabad!’ (death to the dhoti wearers). Madhu accurately pointed out that many Nepalese citizens wear the dhoti.
During and after my VSO time, I paid several visits to Madhu’s ashram, a separate building in the grounds of his family home at Singhwara, a village about halfway between Darbhanga and Muzzafarpur in the heart of the Maithili region. On one occasion I had to ride on the roof of a crowded bus and, shortly before we reached Singhwara, someone urgently exclaimed `Tar!’ To me this Hindi word meant only `telegram’ and I did not realise its original meaning was simply `wire’. The bus was in fact about to pass under a low-hanging telephone line and luckily, when I did not react, the speaker grabbed my head and pulled me down with him.
In Singhwara itself I was treated with great kindness and consideration both by Madhu and his mother and other villagers. Unfortunately, hospitality from the latter included offering me a glass of bhang,[4] which I had not encountered before and downed rapidly. The effect was similar to what I had experienced when trying hash in solid form in Kathmandu – disorientation and an onset of paranoiac delusions in which my companions seemed to loom up against me almost like snakes. It took me several hours resting in my room to recover.
In 1976, when I was working in London as a civil servant, Madhu paid two visits to Britain, on his way to and from North America. On arrival from France, he was unfortunately detained by the Immigration Service at Dover and I had to catch a train from London at around 4.00 a.m. to explain that I was sponsoring his visit. After that, we had a happy time travelling together to visit my relatives and old VSO friends. I remember his striking up a conversation in Hindi with a Bangladeshi immigrant on the train between my home town, Nottingham, and London. The Bangladeshi remarked on London’s status as the capital of the country and Madhu responded `Duniya ki rajdhani hai!’ (It’s the capital of the world!)
When I was again in South Asia on a research visit in 1982-3, Madhu and his family provided invaluable help. We travelled together from Singhwara across North India, staying with his brothers, including Janardan, a prominent journalist who lived on the western side of Delhi.[5] We were also guests of a direct descendant of the subject of my research, Jang Bahadur Rana, in a dilapidated palace on the outskirts of Allahabad. On one night when we were sharing a hotel room, I was woken up in the small hours by Madhu reciting in Sanskrit the Shivamahimastotra (`Hymn to Shiva’s Glory’), with its key line `All things have their end in Thee.’
After a short period in Delhi, Madhu returned to Singhwara but I stayed on through the winter. Janardan arranged for me to rent a small flat near his own place from which I could easily commute into the city centre for my work in the National Archives. I visited the Singhwara ashram again as I made my way back to Calcutta and then to Nepal in the spring.
My most recent meetings with Madhu were in August 2018 when I was again consulting the National Archives of India. I was based in a hotel near the Archives but attended the talk he gave at a book launch[6] and also enjoyed the hospitality of Janardan’s son, Sankarshan,[7] both at the family home in Palam Vihar, where Madhu himself now lives, and at the Press Trust of India on Sansad Marg.
Since then contact, as with other friends outside since the Covid pandemic started, has been over the internet. This has at least enabled us to pay tribute to Madhu as he enters his 90th year and express our happiness that he remains intellectually active as ever. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to have him as a friend for almost fifty years.
NOTES
[1] The Amazon page for the English edition incorporates a review for a completely different book and this has been copied by Pilgrims’ Book House - https://www.pilgrimsonlineshop.com/1342-every-place-every-person-a-himalayan-tale-from-darjeeling.html However, a good overview is provided by C.K.Lal at http://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=331#.YWZl-cRIDwM
[2] Voluntary Service Overseas is the British equivalent of the American Peace Corps. My own brief account of life in Kathmandu in the 70’s is at https://linguae.weebly.com/vso-reminiscences.html
[3]A good general account of this phenomenon, for which both Ramesh and two other mutual friends,.Abhi Subedi and Nirmal Tuladhar, were informants, is Mark Liechty’s Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal (Kathmandu: Martin Chautari, 2017). Madhu himself is also mentioned in the Kathmandu section of LSD pioneer Michael Hollingshead’s memoir, The Man Who Turned on the World (Blond and Briggs, 1973); available at http://docshare01.docshare.tips/files/22594/225944737.pdf ).
[4] On bhang’s role in India culture, and the possible adverse effects, see Charukesi Ramadurai’s article at https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170307-the-intoxicating-drug-of-an-indian-god
[5]In addition to his regular work as a journalist, Janardan Thakur authored several books, including All the Prime Minister’s Men (New Dellhi: Vikas, 1977) and All the Janata Men (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978)
[6]This was for his old Bihari friend Sachidanand Sinha’s biography of a political activist from the same state, Braja Kishore Prasad; the Hero of Many Battles (New Delhi: National Book Trust, India, 2018).
[7]Sankarshan Thakur has followed his father’s footsteps, becoming a well-known journalist and also authoring The Brothers Bihari (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2014) as well as earlier separate biographies of politicians Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar.
1.Memories of Madhu
Ramesh Shrestha
It was from Ajit K Mishra that I first heard about Prof Madhusudan Thakur.
“It’s not me, not me but the wind that blows against me,” Mishra Sir apologized each time he was late for his afternoon classes on “American Literature,” having taken a bus like all of us did from Ratna Park, near Tri-Chandra Campus, where he was also teaching. He was from Bhagalpur University, Bihar and had come to Nepal as a Colombo Plan professor.
Dr Mishra used to invite us to visit him some weekends to his rented place in Naxal. Sometimes he would “tutor” us by giving writing assignments during our Final MA year (1971) on topics like pessimism in Thomas Hardy’s novels or an analysis of the mid-night reveries of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James - and so on and so forth.
I would go to the university library, where I worked as a head clerk, across from the Boys’ Hostel, where I stayed, and put together an essay (with passages lifted largely from critics like Sir David Cecil, Harold Bloom etc.) and promptly turned up at Dr. Mishra’s place the following Saturday, when his kind and tall wife unfailingly served tea with finger biscuits first thing. Mishra Sir would then go over my last week’s assignment with me and write his comments in nice blue ink I still remember.
It was from Ajit K Mishra that I first heard about Prof Madhusudan Thakur.
He talked about him as someone who had come to Kathmandu like himself as a Colombo
Plan professor but afterwards had dropped out from the academic world and started pursuing an alternative lifestyle in Kathmandu spending his time often with the young hippies and local literati.
Mishra Sir told us what a brilliant family the erstwhile professor came from – his brother Damodar Thakur was a Professor at Delhi University; another brother a popular journalist who had written All the Prime Minister’s Men and so on.
`Why would a brilliant professor just give up his career and live like a hippie?’ I asked. `Find him on New Road and ask him’, Mishra sir encouragingly replied.
Meeting on New Road
And that’s what AbhiSubedi, one of my soul mates then (and now), and I did when we saw him one afternoononNew Road under where else but the Pipul Tree.
“Aren’t you Prof Madhusudan Thakur,” we must have asked him. We then invited him for a cup of tea at the tea shop across the road. There used to be more tea shops, coffee houses and betel shops those days on New Road than today.
I think we probably started off by calling him Prof Thakur or Guru. `Call me Madhu’, he said. We found him friendly and easy to talk to.
During our tea and cigarettes, I took out from my pocket my new poem “To My 23rd Year”:
Now hold on to time
And walk gently into the timeless
Rough-shod into the spaceless.
Sweet time stop softly
Till I end this journey
Rough-shod was Madhu’s hand-written addition to the poem. I’m pretty sure the day was 4th of May 1973.
We started meeting Madhu regularly on New Road, that’s where everybody met everybody those days. You went and stood under the Pipul Tree – sometimes got your shoes shined. And very soon Abhi would turn up and also TulsiDiwas, Upendra Shrestha, RochakGhimire, Vijaya Malla, Shailendra Saakar - all the shakers and movers of the Nepali literary scene: poets and poetasters, publishers, news reporters, proof readers, students, professors, singers, coffee house intellectuals of all climes and colors.
Besides New Road, Sarala Bajracharya’shome comes to mind as another place for our rendezvous with Madhu. Sarala, who had spent a few years in Russia learning Russian language and culture, had been a long-time friend of Madhu. Her three-story white house was near New Road in Basantapur opposite Hanuman Dhoka right next to right next to what used to be known as Freak Street, where all the hippies found their home.
Bhimsenthandays
Freak Street was right next to Bhimsenthan where Saket Thakur and I rented a one-room apartment. Finding once that Madhu was looking for a place to stay, I invited him to join us. Madhu soon moved in with all his belongings in one tin trunk. Now we had three beds in one room but it was no problem as we were easy-going and enjoyed Madhu’s own easy ways. We had a separate kitchen for our lady cook to concoct our low-cost dal-bhat-tarkari meal twice a day.
Actually, this Bhimsenthan dera was rented by Saket for himself first but I liked the place when he invited me to visit. I thought the room looked nice and big enough to easily accommodate two. I asked if I could move in and was accepted.
Now I had invited a third person and it was great of Saket to accept another Thakur to cram the place even further.
Now Madhu is going to start his 90th year this October. I turned 72 by Nepali reckoningjust this April. So, the 18 years gap between the two of us now seems huge.
But I don’t think the gap existed then. We were all young - I was 23; Saket 30 and Madhu 41.Our world then was definitely young with all its inhabitants even younger than they are now. At the same time, having older people around me was no problem for me as everybody was older than me come to think of it: besides Saket, Nirmal Tuladhar, and Abhi, here I’m thinking of Chaitanya Upadhaya, Krishna Gurung and Peter Karthak– the last three having already and very sadly departed ahead of us.
Being the youngest I was often the most lost: I found in Madhu a kindred spirit, sympathetic companionship. In a way he was like my intellectual, moral, spiritual guide, helping me to navigate through my days of growing up!
Our place in Bhimsenthan was small but was enough to hold parties, lots and lots of them. Often with lots of local rakshi booze with friends sometime spending the night there. Saket was exquisitely skilled in rolling joints, blending tobacco with cannabis grass and charas lovingly on the palm of his hand.
The following lines from Peter Karthak’s poem will add to the picture:
To Madhusudan Thakur
What are you going to tell me next?
“Insecurity is the price of freedom.”
What now?
That insecurity is your bliss
And that you were made for it?
Peter was so intrigued that Madhu also provided the model for the Indian Intelligence officer in his award-winning novel Pratyek Thaun Pratyek Manche (published in English as Every Place, Every Person: a Himalayan Tale from Darjeeling[1])
To Ashram Singhawara:kitne log so rahehai
It was I think still 1973, the beginning of winter vacation at Patan College, where Abhi and I were both teaching English (Peter Karthak was doing the same at a nearby Engineering campus), when Madhu invited us to his Ashram Singhwara.
We accepted gladly as it’d be handy to take train again and go meet Peter visiting his home town of Darjeeling.
Three of us then took a bus down the narrow Tribhuvan Rajpath to Birgunj, the only road out of Kathmandu to the Terai available then. From Birgunj we took a rickshaw and tanga horse cart across the Indian border to the rail-head town of Raxaul for a whole-night train ride to Darbhanga.
We got to Darbhanga when the morning was just breaking.
Madhu is lying down on one of the benches. We’re in a third-class compartment
“It’s morning time already. Get up. Subha ho gaya Utho Uth,” says an Indian passenger trying to wake us up.
Madhu seems to be annoyed at the guy bothering us:.
Chalo aapko dekhadunga abhi kitne log so rahe hai.
`Let’s go, I’ll show you how many people are still asleep,`Madhu told the passenger, who looked like no more than a gentle farmer and so seemed quite lost at the reaction.
Madhu had just uttered a mantra that Abhi and I have been using all our life since then: kitne log so rahe hai.
A couple of hours’ bus ride took us finally to Ashram Singhwara, a nice, quiet rural hideaway Madhu had created for himself and his friends at the village where he was born. Besides his ageing mother, I remember meeting a fisherman who in the morning brought fresh toddy from a palm tree. This fermented all day and provided us with our sundowner every evening.
I think the following extract from one of the letters Madhu wrote to me around this time nicely describes his approach to Ashram Singhwara:
“And so the pilgrimage goes on and a strange grace continues to shower in a nonstop steady fashion that intrigues me too: the meaning of all this constitutes my life and I daren’t question it too closely lest it all wither in my hands- it’s enough to let it flower! It’s pretty agonizing to look at it all from the other end and ask the meaning of my life and where it’s leading, where it’ll all end, which I do sometimes in the stillness of my own self, but it does not matter since it’s always fulfilling in a strange unexplainable way. In the process, a rich and varied relationship with Nepal is growing all the time and I already have what you call “two worlds to work on.” Someday I might perhaps have enough leisure to make this concrete, give it a “local habitation and a name” for us all.
Ashram Singhawara proved to be popular among many of his friends. Among mutual friends who found their way there were John Whelpton and Durga Pokhrel.
Abhi and I left the Ashram on the same bus that had brought us from Darbhanga. I can still hear the plaintive honking of the bus from miles away as we waited for it.
Without Madhu, Darbhanga to Siliguri was an uneventful train ride. From Siliguri we shared a taxi to Darjeeling with two garrulous Bengali boys. Darjeeling was cold and under the mist most days. Peter introduced us to our first beef sukuti and tomba, millet beer. He took us to meet famous local litterateurs Raj Narain Pradhan and Lakkhi Devi Sundas. Sadly, not Indra Bahadur Rai, I don’t remember why.
DhulikhelSvaha
Back from Darjeeling, the year 1974 started with a very badly planned trip to Dhulikhel, which Madhu also joined. As usual, our Dhulikhel friend Hari Bhakta Khoju was the chief host. Joining in the day out were Saket, and the late Dr Mishra - he was a homeopathic doctor and when he laughed the whole world laughed with him. As we were short of rupees as usual, we couldn’t afford to stay at the Dhulikhel Lodge, the town’s first hotel Bel Prasad had opened just a year or so before. So, Hari Bhakta took us to spend the night at a high school just above the football ground. It was a cold wintry night so we made a bonfire with wood/dry bamboo stolen from a nearby farm wall (for which Hari Bhakta got squarely chided next day by the owner who happened to be his relative).
Why this story? Just to remember that Madhu was the one doing the fire sermon “ Ommunimunimahamuniyaswaha” chanting Sanskrit slokas around the fireplace through the night.
Out of Asia
Nineteen Seventy-Four was also the year I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to do my Master’s in Linguistics at Michigan State, East Lansing. In the world we lived then everybody met and recommended their friends. Thus, Madhu recommended, nay arranged for me to stop on the way to Michigan in Germany and meet one of his young friends, Ute Johanna Mayer, and her family. Madhu had then many friends, devotees and admirers throughout Europe and North America.
For someone like me who had never seen a jumbo jet, a smart thing, thinking back today, would have been just to fly straight to East Lansing on the PanAm 101 flight ticket I was given. But I also was ready to face the world.
Soon I got an aerogramme from Ute confirming the invitation. All I had to do after I got off the plane in Frankfurt was to call her to let her know I had arrived, then wait for her at the airport coffee shop where she would come and pick me up.
But for someone who had never seen a public telephone booth (Kathmandu did not have a public phone service then) trying to make that important call from an airport seemed likely to be as disorganized as our trip to Dhulikhel. How did a public phone operate?
But in those days, none of that mattered and a guardian angel seemed to always hover around your shoulders.
It just happened that I was sitting next to an American young man who had just finished his Peace Corps volunteer stint in Nepal and was on his way home. And I think he realized the horror of my situation when I told him about my plan in the city. He swung into action – came out of the plane with me, made the call, connected me with Ute.
But he was not there to help me deposit my suitcase in a coin-operated left luggage box. At the coffee shop, the milk for my coffee came from a sachet and the sugar from a bottle dispenser – very confusing. Life was getting to be so stressful.
But Ute came promptly as promised and took me by train to her house in Kalkheim, Taunus. I had never met a mother so spiritually enlightened. With her brother Wolf and his friends, I sampled my first home-made red wine.
Just as Madhu loomed large this way in the beginning of my trip to America, he appeared on the scene when I was finishing my scholarship run of two years.
It all started with our mutual friend Krishna Gurung (RIP) stopping over for a visit in East Lansing and both of us deciding to go and meet Madhu who had then also been visiting his own friend in Ontario, Canada. Krishna had just finished his two-year graduate degree in TOEFL at the University of Hawaii Moana campus under an East-West Center scholarship grant.
Our historic meeting with Madhu and his friend Daniel Sokoloski took place on the American side of the Niagara Falls on the day after the 4th of July 1976 – that is a day after the Bicentennial American Day of Independence, which Krishna and I had celebrated by bivouacking in the park, all the town’s motel rooms having been fully booked for the holiday week end.
When I came back to Nepal, Madhu had started working as a lecturer at TU. He had gone back to the same profession he was in when he first came to Nepal – teaching. I emigrated to Thailand in 1980 and so met him only sporadically when I visited Nepal. We had completely lost touch until a few years ago when John Whelpton found him alive and well in New Delhi. We happily continue to connect on e-mail.
Being able to reminisce about things spanning over half a century among friends still living is a great privilege. Long Live Madhu and the same for all of us!
2. Madhusudan Thakur: friend and guru
AbhiSubedi
Some people who knew Murari Madhusudan Thakur (MM Thakur) had told me stories about him before I met him in person for the first time on Kathmandu’s New Road one afternoon. Ramesh Shrestha and I met him together. I forgot the exact year and month; I think it was a sunny day in the winter of 1972. People portrayed Madhu as a flaneur, a freak and a yogi who had many friends among the foreigners and the natives in Kathmandu. We addressed him as Madhu after we became familiar. Madhu's visit to Kathmandu coincided with the visits of freaks and wanderers mainly from the Western countries; they were also called hippies. Later when I became friends with them I discovered that most of them were not happy with theterm 'hippie'. In retrospect, I feel I had made a picture of Madhu as a different kind of hippie, an erstwhile academic who had also taught English literature at Tri-Chandra College (TC)in Kathmandu. Madhu was one of those English teachers who had come hereto teach for a fixed period of time at various colleges under what was called the Colombo Plan.Madhu's elder brother Damodar Thakur, whom I never met, had also taught at TC. Four other 'Colombo Plan' teachers also taught meat the M.A. English class in Kirtipur. Madhu had already left Nepal before I joined the class in 1967.
I had made a picture of Madhu in my mind--a scholar of free spirit with a unique and distinct modus vivendi, and a philosopher from this part of the world who was out in search of new meanings and values in life.I had already made friends with some hippies when I met Madhu. So it was both a challenge and a source of excitement to meet Madhu himself. In retrospect, I feel I had somehow conjured up a similar picture of Madhuto the one spelt out in the following remarks by a hippie and scholar named Michael Hollingshead: "I told Madhu that I thought we were all on some kind of sort of [sic] quest and had found in Kathmandu the perfect place to start. Kathmandu was a city of refugees, the New Jerusalem of the Sadhakas, who had come to savour of the fruits of Paradise."(The Man 124-125). Madhu was not a typical sadhaka or a 'refugee' and certainly not one who had come to Kathmandu to 'savour the fruits of Paradise'. But Madhu had full sympathy with those who had come to Kathmandu in the spirit Hollingshead described.I always felt that Madhu had something to explain to these visitors. They looked to him for that. That's why Madhu made some good friends among them.
I felt Madhu would be a good bridge and an interpreter for us also. My understanding was that Madhu had this ability as someone who was already exposed to the metropolitan culture and had educational experience in Canada. For this reason also I very much wanted to meet him. Ramesh also wanted to meet him, I guess, for more or less the same reasons. As I said, one winter afternoon Ramesh and I went to the New Road addaa, the shade of an old peepul tree that still stands there, to take a chance to meet Madhu.And we did indeed meet him. The thrill I felt from this meeting still remains deep down in me. It is the subject of a longer personal essay. Here I would like to recall our distinct, first image of Madhu. He walked there just like any other visitor. He was wearing a reddish thick woollen jacket, and had neatly combed his long somewhat unctuous hair behind. He had a beard and wore thick glasses.
Madhu's image that we conjured up initially remained until later times. I have some textual evidence for that. Ramesh Shrestha, the late Peter Karthak and I wrote poems in English, which we eventually published in the late seventies in an anthology entitled Manas (1977) after the name Manasarovara. The senior artist Uttam Nepali who passed away this year (2021) made a very nice cover for that. I am alluding to one of my poems in that collection that I had written after seeing Madhu's Ashram in a village named Singhwara in Darbhanga district of Bihar. Ramesh and I decided to join Peter Karthak who was going home to Darjeeling, and Madhu who was going to Singhwara. That must have been in 1973. We visited Madhu's village as our first goal. We travelled by train. I still remember one small but very interesting incident that happened inside the train at night. One passenger who had wanted to lie down for a while and take a nap found us in his way. He made a gentle protest. Madhu replied to him in Hindi with a question--abhi kitne log so rahe hae, tumko malum hae? Or 'do you know how many people are sleeping right now?' The point was difficult for this man to grasp. He kept quiet.
We reached Singhwara in the morning. I was moved to see the simple, calm and inspiring centre of Madhu’s life there. The sight of the ancient green trees, attractive country houses and a creek beside the Ashram impressed me so much that I spontaneously composed a poem then and there and titled it "Ashram Singhwara". I want to quote the last stanza:
As for you,
When you come here
If the river, the chirping of birds
And the sound of deep silence
Do chime with the Professor's tidal ripples
With his smiling face,
And if you grasp the sonata
You may think
That the Ashram Singhwara has at long last come up.
That was my quest, my way of understanding Madhu, who remembers that incident in these words in his unpublished memoirs that I cannot resist the temptation of quoting with due apologies: "One of them was so moved by the atmosphere on arrival there that he wanted to write immediately on it. The lines that he was moved to write then became a memorable witness to the Ashram at Singhwara". My feeling is that we had created an image of Madhu as someone very close to us.Yet we maintained also a distinct image of him as a guru, and a creative freak who we valued as a bridge to a wider world. We needed him somehow for our own complex, personal reasons.
Madhu published a review of our anthology in the October 6, 1980 edition of a Kathmandu newspaper, The Commoner (October 6, 1980), under the title "Manas: An Evaluation". This review shows Madhu’s rare insight into our poetry, our dreams and us ourselves. Madhu has so far not written much else about us, not even in his as yet unpublished memoirs. Without mentioning Ramesh’s name or mine, hehas, however, penned these words that I want to cite from his text, again with due apologies:
"This was the beginning of a long friendship with the young people which grew close as time passed. I learnt that they had been students of English at Tribhuvan University, had missed being my students by several years during my Colombo Plan assignment in the early to mid 1960s. … I left in 1965. But even more importantly, they both wrote poetry in Nepali and occasionally tried their hand at writing in English".
Madhudescribes us and our quest in Manas as follows: "As the remarks on the back cover seem to indicate, their coming out together does not owe itself to a mere coincidence; they share certain attitudes and speak from a common stance, owing allegiance to certain values held in common. This is exactly what Manas is intended to represent."(Madhu, "Manas: An Evaluation"). Madhu portrays Ramesh and me as youths whose anxiety about the Manas quest was similar; and Peter with his style of quest characterised by his rather extrovert and 'easy-going' nature was a little different from us. Madhu cites our poems to make his point. Evoking the spirit of Mansarovar,Madhu adds, "The poems collected here are a gift offering to this Mansarovarness of Kathmandu, in celebration, an invocation of the self-same spirit inherent in this ancient city...". Interestingly, Madhu's observation echoes Hollingshead's remarks (quoted above) about Kathmandu being a place for the sadhakas. This is a very eloquent comparison.
In Kathmandu Madhu remained active as a seeker and writer. He moved like a sadhaka and a person who socialised with both the natives and the foreigners here. He wrote essays about such experiences, and compiled them in a collection that was published by his friend Uttam Kunwar, under the title Nepal: a miscellany (1975). He was working on his next collection of philosophical essays when he came to Kathmandu again and discussed them with us. Later they were published in India under the title Thus Spake Bhisma. (1992). He worked on a collection of Laxmi Prasad Devkota's poems and got it published in Kathmandu. I know Madhu has written other books that are published in India. Those I know are the poems of Nirala and the compilation of translated Maithili stories.There may me more, but I have no information about them.
One short essay cannot cover our long friendship and association with Madhu. At one point I played a role in bringing Madhu to teach with us at the Central Department of English in Kirtipur of Tribhuvan University. For me, those were great few years of working together with Madhu. But more important than that was Madhu's close association with Kathmandu, the people he knew before we met him and those who were our common friends. He had friends across the generations and disciplines both in Nepal and outside. He maintained his contact with people from abroad, especially those 'sadhakas' who visited Kathmandu at different times. Our long friendship remains strong even today though we have not physically met Madhu for many years. John Whelpton met him not so long ago on a research visit to Delhi. Peter Karthak passed away a few years ago. I wish he were here writing like us some words of tribute on the occasion of Madhu's ninetieth birthday that falls on October 15,2021. Happy Birthday, dear Madhu, friend and Guru!
References
Hollingshead, Michael. (1973) The Man Who Turned on the World.London: Bond and Briggs.
Available athttp://docshare01.docshare.tips/files/22594/225944737.pdf
Shrestha, Ramesh, AbhiSubedi, Peter Karthak. (1977). Manas.Kathmandu: RAP.
Thakur, M.M. (1975). Nepal: A Miscellany. Kathmandu: UttamKunwar.
Thakur, M.M. (1980, October 6). "Manas: An Evaluation". The Commoner. Kathmandu: The Commoner Pvt. Ltd.
Thakur, M.M. (1988). Selected Poems by Laxmi Prasad Devkota.Second edition. Kathmandu: Sandesh Griha.
Thakur, M.M. (1992).Thus SpakeBhisma. Delhi: Motilalbanarsidas.
3. Prof.Murari Madhusudan Thakur aka Madhu
NirmalTuladhar
Prologue to my first meeting with Madhu
After my SLC in 1964, I enrolled for the Intermediate of Arts (IA) in Tri-Chandra College (TC). My elective subjects were Special English, Psychology and Civics out of the following subjects that carried two papers with 200 marks:
Special English
Psychology
Civics
Logic
Mathematics
Economics
History
In addition to the above-stated subjects, there were compulsory English (200 marks) andVernacular languages (100 marks), the latter including 50 for compulsory Nepali and 50forNewaror Maithili or English. I chose English. Intermediate of Arts (IA) was a kind of liberal arts course, which comprised two years of schooling. In the full university sequence, IA took up the first year and second year, Bachelor of Arts (BA), which was also a liberal arts course, the third and fourth, and Master of Arts (MA) the fifth and sixth. After SLC (ten years of schooling), it required an additional6 years of education to obtain an MA degree. This was the higher education system prior to the introduction of the National Education System Plan in 1971.
Special English and Psychology were new elective courses, only introduced in 1964, so there was no classroom available for Special English at the TC building. So the class for Special English was held at the science block recently built next to the Saraswoti Sadan. For the first time I noticed the classrooms for science were different from the ones in the main building of TC. The science classroom had desks and benches that were arranged in a gallery-like or theatre-like style. In other words, desks and benches were in tiers. A teacher’s desk was on the ground. Students cast their gaze down to teachers. And they look up to students on the higher benches. The classrooms at the TC building have desks on daises for teachers. Students sit on benches and desks at ground level while the teachers sit at a desk on the dais. Here students look up at teachers, and the teachers look down at students. This was a basic difference between arts and science classrooms.
My first sighting of Prof. Madhusudan Thakur in 1964
Prof. Madhusudan Thakur made an entry into the science classroom to teach a poem from Poet’s Lips. Bespectacled and clad in a brownish corduroy jacket and with a deep, impressive voice (bulanda), he read out one of the romantic poems from Poet’s Lips. He asked us what the poem was about. One of my classmates, Madhu Shumshere J.B. Rana, said it was a romantic poem. Rana was a drop-out from St. Xavier’s School. No doubt, he spoke far better English than we. This was my first memory of seeing Prof. Thakur. Later we came to know he was a Colombo Plan Professor and he also taught MA students at Tribhuvan University inTripureshwor.
My second hearing of Prof. Madhusudan Thakur in 1972
To the best of my memory, this must be the period when I was doing my master’s in Linguistics by dissertation – the first and last program jointly run by the Institute for Nepal and Asian Studies (now the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS)) and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in 1972 -74.
There was an evening gathering as usual in Abhi’s rented room at Bangemudā behind Prof. K.P. Malla’s house before he moved to the room opposite Malla’s house. All of a sudden a familiar voice hit my ears. That bulanda voice I had heard in 1964 turned out to be that of Prof. Madhusudan Thakur. After that I would often find him among my friends – Abhi, Ramesh, Thakur, Peter and Krishna Gurung. I started seeing him more often in Thakur and Ramesh’s room in Bhimsenthān later. Then Prof. Madhusudan Thakur became familiar enough to be Madhu for me.
Madhu is near-sighted, he wears glasses with high prescription. In the early 1970’s our optical shop, Nisika Opticals, was at Takshay Baha near the Grand Wool Centre, and he would often drop by in the evening when I was looking after the shop during my father’s tea break. One evening Ms. Brown Bledsoe, an undergraduate affiliate at CNAS, TU, was at my shop, and Madhu stopped by as usual. I think I introduced her to him or the other way round. She was working on Newar jewelry for her undergraduate thesis. We were chit-chatting about whether boys piercedtheir ears to wear earrings. I was saying Newar boys did and showing my own pierced lobe. Then and there he got to his feet and came over to me to show his pierced lobe. Perhaps he was not happy with what I said. What he meant to say was thatit was not just Newar boys who wear earrings, the Indian boys also do. Currently Brown Bledsoe, Ph.D., is Curator of the South Asian Collection, Cornell University Library.
In early 1990s one day while I was going along the footpath on the way to Mandala Book Point I suddenly bumped into Prof. Thakur. He was well dressed as before in 1964 when he was a Colombo Plan Professor. We gave each other a big hug. He said, ‘Nirmal, I will be coming back again soon with a big bang.’ Asked where he was staying, he said in Hotel Vajra and he was writing a book. When I told Abhi about my sudden running into Prof. Thakur, he said Madhu had got a project from the B.P. Koirala India-Nepal Foundation, which brought him to Kathmandu. One evening he came over to my optical shop, Optical Zone, at Bishal Bazar for a new pair of glasses.
Again in1992 Madhu came over to see me at CNAS.Prof.Durga Prasad Bhandari was Executive Director. He was carrying a dust jacket of Thus SpakeBhīṣma. He told me it was his own book recently published but that he had not brought the book itself. He wanted me to postthe dust jacket on the display board in the lobby, which I happily did.
On October 22, 2005 I was attending a training program on ‘Dispensing Progressive Additional Lenses’ organized by Essilor India Pvt. Ltd. at Hotel Annapurna. My Nokia buzzed and I took a call. It was my mother who was calling to say my friend had come to see me. I told her to give the phone to him. Oh, it was Madhu. He said he wanted to see me. I said I was at the programme. He sounded as ifhe wanted to see me as soon as possible. Then I said he could comeover to Hotel Annapurna during the lunch break, and I would be waiting for him in the lobby. He showed up. He looked like the Madhusudan Thakur of 1972. We shook hands. He told my mother had served him tea and biscuits. Then he said he wanted a new pair of glasses as the ones he was wearing were too old. I asked him to come over to my shop the following day. He did that, and I tested his vision. There was a change in prescription from what he was wearing. I made a new pair of glasses for him. This was the last time I saw him.
Frankly speaking, my association with Madhu was basically a teacher-student one but since the 1970s it has been a friendship.
4. Memories of Madhu
John Whelpton
I first met Madhusudan Thakur in spring 1973 in Kathmandu’s Bhimsenthan tol. Marilyn Francis, a fellow British VSO,[2] had told me that an Indian guru was staying with a mutual friend, Ramesh Shrestha. My abiding memory of our meeting is of Madhu sitting cross-legged against the wall of Ramesh’s dera and saying `We are all one!’
Both Madhu and some of my Nepali friends had been attracted by aspects of the counter-culture that flourished in Kathmandu during the `Hippy Era’ of the 1960s and early 70s.[3] Madhu himself had taken the decision to abandon a conventional academic career and live the life of a brahmacharya without going through the householder stage. I was rather less enthusiastic about the `Hippy Era’ but found Madhu a very interesting character, with a deep knowledge of both the ancient Indian tradition, on which he had lectured at McMaster’s University in Canada, and of English literature, which he had originally come to Kathmandu to teach as a Colombo Plan lecturer with Tribhuvan University in the mid-1960s. We became good friends during my initial two years in Kathmandu and have kept in contact ever since.
In summer 1974 the absorption of Sikkim into the Indian Union prompted anti-Indian demonstrations on the Kathmandu streets. Madhu was then staying with me and I was walking with him in the centre of town when one such protest broke out. He encouraged me to mount the bicycle I was wheeling alongside me and ride off to investigate. Nationalist anger was unfortunately directed not only against the Indian government but also against ordinary Indian residents, with students banging on the roof of a car with Sikh occupants and chanting `Dhotiwalla murdabad!’ (death to the dhoti wearers). Madhu accurately pointed out that many Nepalese citizens wear the dhoti.
During and after my VSO time, I paid several visits to Madhu’s ashram, a separate building in the grounds of his family home at Singhwara, a village about halfway between Darbhanga and Muzzafarpur in the heart of the Maithili region. On one occasion I had to ride on the roof of a crowded bus and, shortly before we reached Singhwara, someone urgently exclaimed `Tar!’ To me this Hindi word meant only `telegram’ and I did not realise its original meaning was simply `wire’. The bus was in fact about to pass under a low-hanging telephone line and luckily, when I did not react, the speaker grabbed my head and pulled me down with him.
In Singhwara itself I was treated with great kindness and consideration both by Madhu and his mother and other villagers. Unfortunately, hospitality from the latter included offering me a glass of bhang,[4] which I had not encountered before and downed rapidly. The effect was similar to what I had experienced when trying hash in solid form in Kathmandu – disorientation and an onset of paranoiac delusions in which my companions seemed to loom up against me almost like snakes. It took me several hours resting in my room to recover.
In 1976, when I was working in London as a civil servant, Madhu paid two visits to Britain, on his way to and from North America. On arrival from France, he was unfortunately detained by the Immigration Service at Dover and I had to catch a train from London at around 4.00 a.m. to explain that I was sponsoring his visit. After that, we had a happy time travelling together to visit my relatives and old VSO friends. I remember his striking up a conversation in Hindi with a Bangladeshi immigrant on the train between my home town, Nottingham, and London. The Bangladeshi remarked on London’s status as the capital of the country and Madhu responded `Duniya ki rajdhani hai!’ (It’s the capital of the world!)
When I was again in South Asia on a research visit in 1982-3, Madhu and his family provided invaluable help. We travelled together from Singhwara across North India, staying with his brothers, including Janardan, a prominent journalist who lived on the western side of Delhi.[5] We were also guests of a direct descendant of the subject of my research, Jang Bahadur Rana, in a dilapidated palace on the outskirts of Allahabad. On one night when we were sharing a hotel room, I was woken up in the small hours by Madhu reciting in Sanskrit the Shivamahimastotra (`Hymn to Shiva’s Glory’), with its key line `All things have their end in Thee.’
After a short period in Delhi, Madhu returned to Singhwara but I stayed on through the winter. Janardan arranged for me to rent a small flat near his own place from which I could easily commute into the city centre for my work in the National Archives. I visited the Singhwara ashram again as I made my way back to Calcutta and then to Nepal in the spring.
My most recent meetings with Madhu were in August 2018 when I was again consulting the National Archives of India. I was based in a hotel near the Archives but attended the talk he gave at a book launch[6] and also enjoyed the hospitality of Janardan’s son, Sankarshan,[7] both at the family home in Palam Vihar, where Madhu himself now lives, and at the Press Trust of India on Sansad Marg.
Since then contact, as with other friends outside since the Covid pandemic started, has been over the internet. This has at least enabled us to pay tribute to Madhu as he enters his 90th year and express our happiness that he remains intellectually active as ever. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to have him as a friend for almost fifty years.
NOTES
[1] The Amazon page for the English edition incorporates a review for a completely different book and this has been copied by Pilgrims’ Book House - https://www.pilgrimsonlineshop.com/1342-every-place-every-person-a-himalayan-tale-from-darjeeling.html However, a good overview is provided by C.K.Lal at http://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=331#.YWZl-cRIDwM
[2] Voluntary Service Overseas is the British equivalent of the American Peace Corps. My own brief account of life in Kathmandu in the 70’s is at https://linguae.weebly.com/vso-reminiscences.html
[3]A good general account of this phenomenon, for which both Ramesh and two other mutual friends,.Abhi Subedi and Nirmal Tuladhar, were informants, is Mark Liechty’s Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal (Kathmandu: Martin Chautari, 2017). Madhu himself is also mentioned in the Kathmandu section of LSD pioneer Michael Hollingshead’s memoir, The Man Who Turned on the World (Blond and Briggs, 1973); available at http://docshare01.docshare.tips/files/22594/225944737.pdf ).
[4] On bhang’s role in India culture, and the possible adverse effects, see Charukesi Ramadurai’s article at https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170307-the-intoxicating-drug-of-an-indian-god
[5]In addition to his regular work as a journalist, Janardan Thakur authored several books, including All the Prime Minister’s Men (New Dellhi: Vikas, 1977) and All the Janata Men (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978)
[6]This was for his old Bihari friend Sachidanand Sinha’s biography of a political activist from the same state, Braja Kishore Prasad; the Hero of Many Battles (New Delhi: National Book Trust, India, 2018).
[7]Sankarshan Thakur has followed his father’s footsteps, becoming a well-known journalist and also authoring The Brothers Bihari (New Delhi: Harper Collins India, 2014) as well as earlier separate biographies of politicians Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar.
PUBLICATIONS OF MADHUSUDAN THAKUR
A. Authored or translated:
1. THE HANUMANBAHUK OF TULSIDAS Dr. Srivardhan Thakur Singhwara 1971
2. NEPAL A MISCELLANY Uttam Kunwar, Kathmandu 1975
3. THUS SPAKE BHISMA Motilal Banarassidas, Delhi 1992
4. AROGYA NIKETAN Maithili Translation of Tarashankar's Bangla novel Sahitya Akademi, Delhi 1997
5. HAMRESAB SAN MATBAR Maithili Translation of Nayantara Sehgal’s novel Sahitya Akademi, Delhi 1998
6. SELECTED POEMS OF DEVKOTA English Translation Sandesh Griha, Kathmandu 1998
7. SHABDASAB Maithili Translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's Le Mots Sahitya Akademi, Delhi 2004
8. SELECTED POEMS OF AMARJI English translation Navaratna Goshthi, Darbhanga 2004
9. VISHWA DARSHAN Maithili Travelogue Navaratna Goshthi, Darbhanga 2005
10. SELECTED POEMS OF NIRALA Sahitya Akademi, Delhi 2006
11. THE VINAY PATRIKA OF TULSIDAS English translation Yash Publication, Delhi 2008
12. DEVAVRATAK ATMAKATHA Maithili Novel Navaratna Goshthi, Darbhanga 2010
13. THE UNWRITTEN AND THE UNSEEN Selected poems of G.P. Vimal Yash Publication, Delhi 2010
14. TALE OF A WASTELAND English Translation of Renu's Hindi novel Parti Parikatha Global vision Press, Delhi 2012
15. SELECTED POEMS OF BHIMNATH JHA English Translation Sahityiki, SarisabPahi Madhubani 2015
16. THE AESTHETE English Translation of early Hindi novel SAUNDARYOPASAK by Brijnandan Sahay, Brijballabh National Book Trust, Delhi 2017 ( Awarded Translation Prize (1999), Sahitya Akademi, Delhi)
17. MYSELF SURPRISED Sankarshan Thakur, Delhi, 2021.
B. Edited journals and books:
1. SEVEN, English Weekly M.M. Thakur, Patna 1968
2. SINGHWARA ASHRAM PATRIKA M.M Thakur, Singhwara 1979- 1982
3. SAAT JAPANI KATHA Chwasa Pasa, Kathmandu 1988
4. THAI SANSKRITIK PARAMPARA Chwasa pasa, Kathmandu 1989
5. AMARANATHA JHA: HUNDRED YEARS Co-edited with Dr. Sureshwar Jha COMMEMORATION COMMITEE Darbhanga 2005
6. DAMODAR THAKUR COMMEMORATION VOLS I&II co-edited with S.N. Sinha, A.K. Jha Bhimnath Jha, P.Prased & S.Thakur D.T. COMMEMORATION COMMITTEE Singhwara, Darbhanga 2014- 2015
7. A HISTORY OF MODERN MAITHILI LITERATURE POST-INDEPENDENCE PERIOD By Dr. Devakant Jha Sahitya Akademi, Delhi 2005
8. CONTEMPORARY MAITHILI SHORT STORIES Sahitya Akadeemi, Delhi 2005.
