'BUCHMAN KI JAI!'

The cavalcade proceeded to Delhi via Ahmedabad and Agra. In Ahmedabad they visited Gandhi's ashram and were entertained by officials of the textile union he had founded; at Agra they saw the Taj Mahal by moonlight. While an Indian train journey was a new experience for most, Buchman enjoyed this renewed view of an ageless land after twenty-six years' absence. On arrival in Delhi he gave 100 rupees to his sleeping car attendant. When an old India hand in the party protested that this was far too much, he replied testily, 'He looked after me. I'm looking after him.'

Buchman with Pandit Nehru

In recent weeks his thoughts had turned more and more to Pandit Nehru. Nehru relates in his autobiography that Buchman gave him a book - it was Begbie's Life Changers - when they first met at Belgaum in 1924 and that he read it 'with amazement' as the 'sudden conversions and confessions...seemed to me to go ill with intellectuality'.9 They met again eighteen months later in Switzerland, where Nehru had brought his wife for her health and where he was taking the chance to view Indian politics in a wider setting, a process which led to his adoption of his own particular brand of Marxism. 'I had long been drawn to socialism and communism,' he writes.'...While the rest of the world was in the grip of the depression and going backward in some ways, in the Soviet country a great new world was being built up before our eyes...Russia apart, the theory and philosophy of Marxism lightened up many a dark corner of my mind.'10

In the middle of this process Buchman invited him to a house-party in Holland, and Nehru wrote regretting that he could not leave his wife to attend. He said that he had been 'very interested' in Life Changers: 'I well remember the description in the book of the weekend in Cambridge. At the time I did not quite appreciate the significance of the sudden changes brought about in the lives of individuals ... I can understand the value of absolute frankness...But somehow the idea of faith cures does not appeal to me much...And this is so in spite of the fact that Mr Gandhi, for whom I have great respect, lays the greatest stress on faith. Perhaps my early scientific training as well as the general irreverence of the modern age are partly responsible for this.'

415

Photo: Buchman renews acquaintance with Pandit Nehru in Delhi, December 1952.
©David Channer/MRA Productions