Freedom Fighter
Because of my continuing interest in Krishna, I didn’t do well enough in school to go to college.
Instead, at the age of eighteen, I got a job as a travelling salesman. I enjoyed the work very much because it gave me the opportunity to travel all over India.Then, in 1930, when I was twenty years old, my father decided that it was time for me to get married. I didn’t like the idea at all, but to avoid a big family argument I agreed to marry the woman my father selected for me. I became a householder and in due course fathered a daughter and a son.
During
the next few years my interest in nationalist politics temporarily
competed with my continuing interest in Krishna. To understand this part
of my story it will be necessary to give a little background information
about the conditions we were then living and working in.
The
1930’s were a time of great political unrest. The British rule of
India was being challenged in many ways. There was a feeling in the air
that if we organised ourselves properly and put enough pressure on the
government, we could put an end to the colonial occupation. Gandhi, the
most well-known of the freedom fighters, was espousing a campaign of
non-cooperation and non-violence, hoping that if enough Indians refused
to obey the orders of the British, they would accept
that the country was ungovernable and leave us to look after our own
affairs. I didn’t accept this theory at all. I was and am a great
believer in direct action and I felt that we should confront the British
with a show of force. ‘If some people break into my house,’ I
reasoned, ‘and take it over so completely that they have us running
around obeying their orders, what should we do?’ The Gandhian answer
would be, ‘Politely ask them to leave, and if they say “no”, refuse
to obey any of their orders’. I thought that this approach was being
pusillanimous. In my experience, squatters who have appropriated
someone else’s property don’t listen to polite requests. I,
therefore, was in favour of picking up a stick and driving them out by
force.
But how to do it? The British were very well organised and I knew that a direct physical
assault would not make much of a dent in
their power structure. I decided instead to gain some yogic siddhis and then
use these siddhis to attack the British.I took to frequenting a
graveyard at night, my idea being that if I could summon up spirits of the
dead and gain control over them, I could then unleash these forces on the
British. I succeeded in summoning up an assortment of spirits and even
managed to control them enough for them to do my bidding, but I soon realised that these entities had very little power and that they
would not be effective weapons against the British.
Undaunted,
I joined a group of freedom fighters who had decided to take direct
military action against the British. We were essentially a group of
saboteurs whose aim was to conduct a guerrilla war against our rulers by
attacking key military, economic and political targets. I was trained
how to make bombs and looked forward to the day when I would see some
direct military action.
Although
I was not directly involved, our group was responsible for blowing up
the Viceroy’s train as he was travelling to Peshawar. Our equipment
was a bit primitive, for we had to rely on a fuse rather than detonation
by remote control. The timing was not quite right and we ended up
blowing up the carriage that was adjacent to the one which the Viceroy
was occupying. The Viceroy escaped unhurt.