Author Govert SchullerPosted on Categories Krishnamurti
Nitya: A Tale of Two Brothers
Mahesh Kishore, SHF Publications, 2019 (order here)
Just finished reading this remarkable study of the relationship of Krishnamurti and his younger brother Nityananda. The author provides a very intimate and sympathetic narrative of their deep friendship in the context of the World Teacher Project inaugurated by the then leaders of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater. This Project was the physical and mental preparation of the human ‘vehicle’ Krishnamurti for the consciousness of Maitreya, Buddha’s main disciple, to manifest through.
The narrative is firmly premised on 1) the idea that the Project was genuine, i.e. transcendental forces and personalities (Masters) were responsible for its start and guidance, and 2) that after Nitya’s death in November of 1925 his personality merged with Krishnamurti’s thereby transferring psychological attitudes Nitya had developed and Krishnamurti somewhat lacked, resulting in a quite different Krishnamurti at the end of December of 1925 when many people believed the first manifestations of Maitreya occurred.
In this manner Nitya indeed had become essential to Krishnamurti’s destiny, something many followers of the Project, including both brothers, believed, even to the extent that some of Nitya’s admirers could easily re-direct their more personable affection for Nitya to Krishnamurti.
The plot-line of the first volume of Mary Lutyen’s 1975 biography of Krishnamurti reads like a chronicle of Krishnamurti’s more or less solitary coming of age and enlightenment (“The Years of Awakening”), and seems to be, as far as its metaphysical premises are concerned, close to K’s deep skepticism of his Theosophical status and destiny as that attitude developed starting around 1927.
Kishore’s plot-line of his study reads more like a love story of two very close friends deeply dedicated (though with some ups and downs) to the Project and all its ramifications (except for the ‘Huizen manifestations’, which is a story by itself). And the author, as indicated above, is very much in sympathy with the Theosophical worldview guiding the brothers till 1925. Because he is in sympathy with that view he can easily recount the brothers’ experiences from their own situated perspective. This enables a very close emphatic interpretation of their lives and contributes to our understanding of the peculiar life-world of these two young men during their formative years. As the back cover justifiably states, the importance of this book is not only the presentation of some new facts, but the author’s “compellingly stringing his research together to create a new picture of of these two astonishing people”.
Very helpful to the narrative are indeed the author’s use of quotes from Nitya’s diary (ca. 10) and the many letters from Nitya to Krishnamurti (ca. 13), to Leadbeater (ca. 15), to Besant (ca. 10), and to the Manziarly family (ca. 8).
The quantity of letters, which have apparently survived, makes me think that it might be time, now about a hundred years after their composition, to have them all published in an academic format.
I like to end this review with a critical note about the author’s main claim regarding the merging of the consciousness of the two brother’s after Nitya’s death. This has to be done, because the author not only makes a strong case for this idea by quoting Krishnamurti himself, but he also recounts stories which makes this claim questionable, though there might be subtle ways out of certain contradictions based on the intricacies of Theosophical psychology, though such ad hoc reinterpretations will have their own interesting implications.
So, even though Krishnamurti made clear statements in his letters and poetry, and in verbal statements to others, that his consciousness had merged with Nitya’s, Kishore also recounts instances in which this idea becomes problematic. For example, and this might be one of the strongest counterfactuals, Kishore refers to Rosalind Rajagopal’s story that, when K saw her daughter Radha for the first time, he supposedly asked “Do you think it’s Nitya?” If the brothers’ consciousnesses had melded that question would never have been asked.