The Idler

Conversations: Satish Kumar

THE END OF PROGRESS

Satish Kumar walked across the world as part of his vision of a new way of thinking. Now, he runs an influential magazine. By JAY WALLJASPER of the Utne Reader

I am clambering up a hillside in the rain, green expanses of Cornish countryside to my left and magnificently rugged coastline to my right, trying to keep up with Satish Kumar, a 60-year-old former Indian monk who once walked halfway around the world to promote disarmament. All of a sudden a giant boom pierces the air. It sounds as though the world’s most horrible thunderstorm is headed straight for us. I stop dead in my muddy tracks, speechless and shaky. So does Satish ahead of me and his wife June Mitchell, right behind.
“What in the world is that?” I yell, searching the gray skies for lightning. “The Concorde,” Satish and June say in unison.
“It often enters England right here on its flight from New York to London,” June explains. I look up toward Satish, who’s frowning in the direction of the plane. For a man whose lifelong mission has been to help the world realize there is more to life than being rich, being fast, being worldly, and being technologically advanced, this surely must pose a reminder of what he’s up against. The peace of his pastoral home is often invaded by the supersonic roar of an energy-guzzling aircraft rushing upscale passengers between world capitals.

I watch as Satish shifts his attention from the sky to the splashing sea and picks up the thread of our interrupted conversation. “Wandering and drifting in nature is one of the things that replenish me,” he says, striding again toward the peak of the hill. “It fills me with energy to keep doing the things I want to do.”

Satish, who can be counted among our most interesting social thinkers, needs considerable energy to accomplish all the things he wants to do.
For several decades he and June have edited Resurgence magazine out of a postcard-perfect stone farmhouse bedecked with ivy and surrounded by flower and vegetable gardens. The magazine, which is now working to widen its tiny North American audience, has been called “the artistic and spiritual flagship of the Green movement” by the Guardian. Satish also directs a college devoted to holistic principles of learning, an alternative school in his local village, and a publishing house – all of which he founded. He lectures all over the world on assorted topics, and will be touring North America in February and March to promote the new American edition of his fascinating autobiography, Path Without Destination (Eagle Brook/William Morrow).

Satish Kumar has set out to do nothing less than make the modern world more aware of the beauty, mystery, and connectedness of all things, and less fixated on hierarchy, competition, and bigness.
Unlike many crusaders for worthy causes, Satish and June actually live the simple life they celebrate. She receives a modest salary from the magazine and he from the college. The mortgage on their house and two acres of gardens and flower patches is held by a trust of Resurgence benefactors. By almost any economic standard of the modern world they are poor, yet it’s hard not to envy this way of life. Their centuries-old cottage lacks central heating but is still as comfortable as any place I’ve ever stepped into, outfitted with authentic editions of the rustic elegance in furnishings, kitchenware, and art that Good Housekeeping strives for. Much of their food comes straight from the garden. The long table in the middle of the wood-beamed kitchen feels like the centre of the universe, the place where friends and family gather over Satish’s Indian dinners and June’s desserts, drinking local cider and talking for hours on end.

Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, psychologist RD Laing, and Gaia theory founder James Lovelock, are among the guests who have enjoyed Satish and June’s bright hospitality. While most of the magazine’s work goes on in a converted stone barn a few steps from the front door, the house’s living room doubles as Satish’s office. He sits down at his old wood desk and we begin to talk.
“My major idea is that we need to change consciousness,” Satish says. He is a small man, wiry and dapper, with a grey goatee and intense brown eyes. “We live under the power of Modern Consciousness, which means that we are obsessed with progress. Wherever you are is not good enough. We always want to achieve something, rather than experience something. The opposite of this is Spiritual Consciousness. By that I mean you find enchantment in every action you do, rather in just the results of your action.

“Spiritual Consciousness is not a particular religion,” he tells me, “but a way of being.” Explaining its tenets in Path Without Destination, he translates a chant that Gandhi composed for morning and evening meditation: “Nonviolence, truth, nonstealing /Sacred sex, nonconsumerism/Physical work, avoidance of bad taste/Fearlessness, respect for all religions/Local economy and respect for all beings./
These eleven principles/Should be followed with humility, care, and commitment. “These principles are not do’s and don’ts,” Satish writes. “They are not vows; they are aspirations and inspirations. They are like resolutions which are made on the eve of a New Year… They could be used as resolutions for the new millenium.” While such sentiments might strike you as completely quixotic as we enters the new century more completely in the thrall of technology, commercialism and globalisation than ever before, his longtime friend Richard Boston counsels that Satish is not someone to underestimate. “His gentleness is accompanied by a will of steel. His schemes are apparently absurd in their Utopianism, but turn out to be quite practical. He is a great deal more hardheaded, shrewder, more canny than he appears at first.” I know what Boston means.

A small but important part of the reason I’m in England trailing Satish through a rain-soaked landscape is to understand how I came to write a column in Resurgence for absolutely no pay. I depend on freelance writing to cover a major portion of my monthly budget, but when Satish, whom I’d never spoken to before, asked me to write the magazine’s “Letter from America” column I immediately answered “yes” without even thinking to ask about money.

To say “no” to Satish, who speaks in an elegant and melodious flow of Indian-accented English, feels like turning down some prestigious and hard-won honour. No one published in Resurgence has ever seen a penny for their labours, and the list includes luminaries like Gary Snyder, Vaclav Havel, Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Thomas Moore, James Hillman, Susan Griffin, Matthew Fox, Winona LaDuke, Ted Hughes, Fritjof Capra,
Ivan Illich, Noam Chomsky, and Prince Charles.
These are some of the same names that teach courses at Schumacher College, the academy of spiritual and ecological education that Satish founded in 1991.

Named after EF Schumacher, the visionary economist whose groundbreaking bestseller Small is Beautiful was based on articles first published in Resurgence, the college offers students of all ages three and five-week courses on subjects like “Psychology and Spirituality” or “A New Economics for People and the Planet”.
Housed in a 14th Century hall on the Dartington Estate in southwestern England, Schumacher College offers people from around the world the experience of immersing themselves in the process of learning – discussing new ideas in classes, over dinner, while washing dishes, and out in the orchard by moonlight.

Satish’s remarkable success in enlisting people’s goodwill and financial help for his numerous projects seems to arise from a highly developed set of skills he’s honed out of a unique life of rebellion, spiritual reflection, and political action. At age nine, against the wishes of his family, he joined an order of Jain monks (a religion with spiritual tenets akin to Hinduism and Buddhism) and spent the next eight years wandering across India, depending on the kindness of villagers each day for meals and a place to sleep.

At seventeen, after reading a book by Gandhi (although reading was forbidden among the monks), he decided to join the campaign being led by Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s successor as leader of India’s village movement.

He helped organise strikes among farmworkers of the untouchable caste, and then became an editor at a newspaper of the Gandhian movement until he was sacked for criticising some prominent Gandhians’ plans to build a complex of fancy modern office buildings – a stark rejection of Gandhi’s own program of simple living.
Later, as he recounts in Path With No Destination, he was sitting with a friend at a caf?�, looking over thenewspaper and noting that the famous British philosopher Bertrand Russell had been jailed at a ban-the-bomb protest in London. It was 1962, and people at breakfast tables all around the planet were uneasy as they learned of the latest round of nuclear sabre-rattling between the United States and the Soviet Union.

But no one else undertook what Satish and his friend Prabhakar Menon did. Inspired by the 90-year-old Russell’s deep convictions, the two of them vowed that morning to make a pilgrimage, bringing a message of peace to leaders of the world’s (then) four nuclear nations.

They set out a few weeks later and walked most of the way from Delhi to Moscow to Paris to London to Washington with no money in their pockets.
They befriended many people along the 8000-mile journey who offered them food and shelter, including Martin Luther King and the Shah of Iran as well as hundreds of peasants and factory workers.

The two of them snuck away from their government hosts in Moscow and eluded Soviet police all the way to the Polish border, engaged in a long discussion about human rights with an East Berlin border guard, were held four days in a filthy Paris jail cell and deported to England, where they met up with Bertrand Russell, who raised money so that they could take the luxurious Queen Mary ocean liner to New York.
Martin Luther King welcomed them to his home in Atlanta, and Satish had a gun held to his head by the owner of a lunch counter in Albany, Georgia, who did not want to serve a brown-skinned man. They met with representatives of Nikita Kruschev, Harold Wilson, and Lyndon Johnson – but not Charles DeGaulle – and gave each of them a packet of tea from a woman they met in Armenia, who said that leaders should brew a pot of tea before making any decision to fire missiles.

Upon returning to India several years later, Satish continued to promote land reform issues and also became involved with humanitarian work among refugees fleeing a bloody civil war in Bangla desh, which led to an invitation to visit London and speak at the opening of photography exhibit about the disaster.

That’s where he met June Mitchell, a librarian speaking at the same event who had done relief work in Bangladesh. Soon the two of them were living together in London with a baby son, making plans to move to India. But one day while taking his daily walk Satish bumped into John Papworth, an English peace activist who had accompanied Satish around the United States on the last leg of his peace pilgrimage and who later founded Resurgence magazine. Papworth was leaving soon for Zambia to become an adviser to President Kenneth Kuanda, and insisted right on the spot that Satish take over the editorship of Resurgence.

Although Satish had no formal schooling, only a limited command of written English, and no visible means of support, he took the job, which paid nothing.

“I didn’t like to… refuse something that was coming to me by fate,” he explains in his autobiography. “I decided to put off my thoughts of returning to India… I should have known that life does not operate on the basis of plans, no matter how rational. My nature is to let things happen rather than make them happen.”

It is this spirit of Taoist detachment that, when paired with Satish’s own undeniable determination, adds up to a very powerful personality – a man toward whom the universe seems to bend a bit, a figure from whom seemingly impossible ideas sound somehow less impossible, especially when you consider the simple sensibleness and fundamental appeal of what he has to say.
“Fragmentation is at the heart of Modern Consciousness,” he says as we sit at the kitchen table eating fresh-baked tarts and sharing a pot of Earl Gray tea. “You divide knowledge into subjects, you divide people into categories. But I think there is something more to the world than what you are able to measure, analyze, and quantify. In Spiritual Conscioussness there is a dance between what you know and what you don’t know. The place of mystery is an essential ingredient.”

Seeing the universe as something that flows in cycles rather than following a path of linear progression, Satish believes that Spiritual Consciousness will eventually replace, or at least counterbalance, Modern Consciousness.
“Modernity is very powerful,” he admits. “It has the media, the corporations. Yet there seems a discontentness in many people today, despite all the glamour and achievement and technology and wealth. There is a sense of the loss of meaning. That’s why people are coming to embrace a different kind of consciousness. And of course the pollution, the crime, the poverty, and the ugliness.” Satish freely acknowledges that he chooses to live in the midst of the modern world and knows it is not always easy to resist its pull. That’s why no matter how urgent the duties of the day, he spends two hours every morning meditating, chanting, and reading, and takes a walk every day with June – and sometimes with their daughter Maya, a college student studying art, and son Mukti, a filmmaker and sailor.

It is also why Resurgence is published in Hartland, an out-of-the-way farming village near the West coast of England.

“Out of my office window I can look at blackcurrants, redcurrants, plums, apples, greengays, quinces, and raspberries growing in the courtyard,” he says. “After a morning of editing we go to the garden and pick the vegetables for lunch. When it’s a beautiful sunny day, we’ll say let’s go outside. No editing today. People tell us we are very inefficient and naive,” he says, a sly grin crossing his face.

“I say, yes, we are inefficient and naive but we are happy. You keep your efficiency and we’ll keep our happiness.”

I ask Satish if he ever gets discouraged about changing the world. Don’t things like regular rumbles from the supersonic Concorde show the invincible power of Modern Consciousness? “Spiritual Consciousness holds that the world is sacred,” he answers firmly. “We must celebrate it rather than just try to improve it. Take joy in what’s here. Outcome is not the point, we must do what is right.

“Change is always a surprise,” he continues. “Look at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid. When I came to England twenty-five years ago, if you stopped in a restaurant and told them you were vegetarian, they would panic, ‘What can we feed you?’ Now fourteen percent of the British population is vegetarian. Even one of the pubs in Hartland has vegetarian curries on the menu.”

Last year, Satish turned 60, an age by which many Indians have renounced their worldliness, given away their possessions, and retreated to a mountaintop. Satish has no such plans. He says he’s content with his life exactly as it is. He says he’s accomplished all he ever hoped for. But then, scratching his goatee and wiggling a bit in the kitchen chair, he admits that he has thought of writing a book about Spiritual Consciousness and ecology. And moments later, he adds that if he could ever find the time he’d love to revive the Arts & Crafts movement – a movement led by socialist poet and designer William Morris in the late 19th Century that rose up in favor of fine craftsmanship, humane working conditions, and simple unadorned beauty in architecture and everyday objects.
Although he is now sitting perfectly still, looking serene in his usual dignified manner, I sense that his mind is rushing ahead with thoughts of more projects to tackle. He looks over at me with a warm yet intense gaze and says, “Let’s take another walk. The rain has stopped now. The coastline will look splendid in the afternoon light.”

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