Arthur Osborne - I become a writer...(6)

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It was in 1950, before this book came out, that we sent

Catherine and Adam, the two eldest children, to England to

finish their education.

 

Had conditions been different, this might have been my

last job. As it was, it became necessary to leave in 1952. I had

an offer of a post on better conditions as principal of a high

school in Calcutta. With Adam to pay for in England that

was quite a consideration. Catherine had been staying with

my parents and she finished school and returned to us before

the end of 1952, but Adam had longer to go and then had to

go on to university.

 

After I had left the paper, the management of the school I

was to take over vacillated and postponed, so it was already

1953 before we went to Calcutta. Thus the last job I was to take

up followed the pattern of my whole professional career —

that each successive post was not only a new job but also a new

kind of job, and that each job lasted four years.

 

I found the work interesting. The work of the head of a

school is quite different from that of a teacher, in fact mainly

organization and administration. And this job also I found of

value in my own development, in developing the qualities of

decisiveness and organizational ability which had remained

latent. Does it sound odd to speak of work helping the

development of one’s character in one’s late forties? Anyway, so

it was. There are two explanations, one personal and the other

general: the former is that altogether I matured late, the latter

that a person who has undertaken the quest does not ossify with

advancing years but remains in a constant state of development.

The school was drying up from the base when I took over, the

two lowest classes both being below strength; when I left it five

years later it had more than doubled in numbers.

 

Catherine also took a job in Calcutta. At the beginning of

1955 she married and left for Peshawar with her husband who

had a job there.

 

Ever since I came to India I had been hearing of a bizarre

saint known as Sai Baba, who not only never wrote a book but

never read one. He lived in a mosque but was worshipped there

by Hindus, making his Hindu and Muslim disciples live

peaceably side by side. He performed a reckless profusion of

miracles but justified them with the profound saying: “I give

people what they want so that they will begin to want what I

want to give them.” He would fly into a rage and abuse or even

beat his devotees, and yet he was all love. He would ask for

money (a thing a saint in India never does) and yet it was all

distributed among the poor, and he himself would go out and

beg his food. He died as long ago as 1918 in the little town of

Shirdi near Bombay, where he had spent his life, and yet as far

south as Madras I found his bust or portrait in house after house,

shop after shop, with incense sticks burning in front of it.

 

Moreover, in four important respects he seemed a precursor

of Bhagavan in adapting spiritual training to the conditions of

the modern world. Like Bhagavan, he gave no formal initiation;

like Bhagavan, he had disciples of different religions; like

Bhagavan, he did not encourage them to renounce the world.

And finally, he also continued to guide his disciples and to attract

new ones after physical death. In hearing or reading the many

stories of his appearance to devotees in dream or vision or in

physical form and of his miraculous intervention in sickness or

misfortune, there is no barrier at 1918; the same sort of cases

occur after this date as before, and are just as frequent.

He probably has a larger following in India than any other

saint, but is almost unknown in the West, perhaps because he

has no philosophy or written teaching to comment on. There

was no readable book about him in English and I had long felt

the need for one. I even wrote an article to that effect to an

Indian periodical. I sent a copy of it to Yorke, hoping that he

might be able to find somebody to undertake the task.

 

I felt that the life of so vivid and bizarre a saint should be written by

some one with a more colourful style than mine. However, I

saw eventually that if it was going to be done I should have to

do it myself. So I wrote my next book, The Incredible Sai Baba.

It was published in Calcutta by Orient Longmans, the eastern

offshoot of Longman Green. By arrangement with them, Riders

also published an edition for sale in England. By this time I was

headmaster of the school in Calcutta.

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* Arthur Osborne: My Life & Quest *

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