Friendship, interiority and mysticism Essays in Dialogue

This collection of essays by Susan Visvanathan looks at dialogue as a way of dealing with difference, even enmity, crossing boundaries, and making meaning. In this context, the author looks at the writings of Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber and Simone Weil. These writers, all of whom are jewish, experienced the holocaust, the Second World War, and in the case of Buber, the question of Israel and Palestine. In the work of all three are woven stands of resistance, issues of suffering, and questions of meaning in an increasingly inhuman world. We also find issues of personal religious/spiritual faith-the faith of one's birth, and that of the other. While Simone Weil's work speaks of her work in the Resistance, and also her life among the workers, Buber attempts to solve the issue of West Asia through dialogue and acceptance and by seeing the land as belonging to both Arabs and Jews. Dr Visvanathan goes on to examine the friendship between Gandhi, Rudra and Andrews - a friendship that made it possible for a Christian mission college(St.Stephens in Delhi) to participate in the freedom movement and to crate an identity that was simultaneously nationalist Indian and Christian. This paper supplements one that traces how the British presence in India - first as traders, then later as imperial rulers - negotiated its relationship with Christian missionaries, both European and Indian, and with Indian religious. This relationship, marked by an absence of dialogue, was attempted to be set right in the Hindu Christian ashrams of Fr. Monchanin, Dom Henri le Saux and Dom Bede Griffiths. Two chapters are devoted to henri le Saux, the French monk who became a sanyasi and a devotee of Shri Ramana and Arunachala, while remaining a devout Christian. Dr Visvanathan discusses this as an aspect of the dialogue of cultures and religious within le Saux's / Abhishiktananda's self, indeed of the dialogue within, between le Saux and Abhishiktananda. Dr Visvanathan poses dialogue as a real and hopeful alternative to pessimistic and violent notions of civilizational clashes.