Maurice Frydman by Dr.M.Sadashiva Rao( source:— Mountain Path, No. 1, 1977) He (Maurice Frydman) belongs only here (to India). Somehow he was born abroad, but has come again here. — Sri Ramana Maharshi Maurice Frydman, also known as Bharatananda, passed away in Bombay on the 9th of March, 1976. He was a selfless and saintly person who had made India his home for five decades. Maurice Frydman Maurice was a great intellectual who was loved for the qualities of his heart by everyone who came into close contact with him. He was born in Poland 1902 of Jewish parents. His father was an apothecary (pharmacist) whom he lost early in life. His mother brought up him and his sister. He had his schooling in Poland and learnt the Russian and German languages along with Polish. After finishing high school, he migrated to Paris to qualify as an electrical engineer. He took up work as a research engineer in a large firm, manufacturing electrical machinery. In France, he had to learn French and later on he learnt English and could write chaste English as most Polish who take to this language do. In India, he learnt to speak Hindi fluently. The present writer came into close contact with Frydman in 1953 and worked with him for about twelve years. As a Research Engineer, he had a large number of patents under his name. From early youth he had great interest in India and its spiritual personages. When he was working in the French engineering firm, Sir Mirza Ismail, then Dewan of Mysore, visited the firm. Frydman met him and asked him a number of questions about India. Sir Mirza asked Frydman whether he was interested in coming to India to organize a firm for manufacturing electrical machinery. Frydman agreed promptly and so came to India to organize the firm now known as the Mysore Electrical Industries Ltd. He worked as the technical head of this manufacturing firm on a good salary for a few years. During this period he often visited Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi and sat at his feet. Many of the questions published in Maharshis Gospel (1939) were put by him, and they elicited detailed replies from the Maharshi. It was during this period that he was attracted to Mahatma Gandhi and began to visit him in Wardha and made many improvements in the charkha (cotton spinning wheel). Gandhiji gave him the name Bharatananda in view of his great love for India. Frydman is known by this name in the Gandhian and Sarvodaya circles. When Frydman came to know that his mother and sister had died in the war, he lost all links with his mother country. Owing to his spiritual leanings and this tragedy, Frydman began to wear the ochre robe of a sannyasi. But he soon gave up the ochre robe as a mere superficial symbol. When he became a sannyasi, he stopped drawing his salary from the firm he was serving. This nonplussed the Mysore Government authorities. But, they were not willing to lose his services as they had a high regard for his abilities and integrity. They kept his salary apart for payment at a later date. When Frydman took the final decision to resign, they paid him the entire amount of the arrears of his salary. This large amount of money he distributed to the most needy of his workers who had looked after him when he was not drawing his pay, and walked out empty handed as a true sannyasi. When asked by the writer how he managed to get on without any money, he replied that his friends always helped him in kind of their own accord. His needs were very little. Frydman wore khadi churidars and kurta which he used to stitch himself. Even the yarn for the cloth, he used to spin himself. He also used to stitch his own leather footwear. Frydman worked for some time in the small princely state of Aundh near Poona. He had become an intimate friend of Sri Apa Pant, formerly High Commissioner for India in London and son of the Rajah of Aundh. Apa Pants high tributes to Frydman are contained in his autobiographical book entitled A Moment of Time (Orient Longman, 1974). Apa Pant relates that he met Frydman in Bangalore in 1937. Within half an hour of meeting each other they became friends and within six months Frydman resigned from the factory and went to Aundh to work from the grass roots for Aundhs new democratic federation of its seventy-two villages. Pant says that people like Frydman do not get into history books but their influence on events and individuals, operating simultaneously at different levels of consciousness, is incalculable. It was Frydman who in December 1937 took Apa Pant to Tiruvannamalai to meet Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. He recalls the Maharshis calm gaze ...seeing all and seeing nothing, and his grace reaching him to the farthest corner of the Old Hall among a couple of hundreds of devotees, dissolving his ego in an awareness of unbounded peace and deep silent joy. After the passing of Gandhiji and the Maharshi, Frydman migrated to Varanasi and took up work in the Rajghat School. He then went to Bombay to work in the All India Khadi and Village Industries Board (later the Khadi and Village Industries Commission) set up by the Government of India in 1953. Many of the members of the Board were his erstwhile coworkers and valued his services. It was in 1953 that the writer came into close contact with Frydman. When asked by the Khadi Board to organize a Research Institute for village industries, the writer accepted this difficult task with great hesitation. Maurice Frydman helped him over a period of several months to make the Research Institute a success. Frydman was deeply interested in J. Krishnamurti and his teachings. He used to arrange for his lectures and also translated his books into French. He understood clearly that Krishnamurtis teachings were basically the same as those of the Maharshi but worded differently. His regard for the Maharshi was deep and lasting. This is expressed clearly in the last brief article of his in the April 1976 number of The Mountain Path, where he bewails the fact that he and many others merely played on the fringe of the ocean of Bhagavans grace and never took the plunge. He had a large portrait of the Maharshi hanging on the wall next to his bed in his small spartan room and practised meditation regularly. Frydman was essentially a karma yogi. Towards the end of his life he did great service to the sadhakas of the jnana path when he tape recorded the talks in Marathi of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, a jnani belonging to the Navanath Sampradaya, starting from Dattatreya. He took great pains to translate and publish them in the book I am That for the benefit of spiritual aspirants on the path of Self-enquiry.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 10:07:59 +0000
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