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treated them badly and because spokesmen of other nations kept telling the British how badly the Hindus were being treated.
    Before meeting Prabhavananda, I had known few Hindus and none of them intimately. I could therefore indulge my prejudice without having to admit individual exceptions. I could picture all Hindus as victims, the kind of victims who provoke you to aggression against them. Their weakness shames you while their silent arrogance condemns you as a bully belonging to an inferior culture. It was this imagined combination of weakness and arrogance which repelled and enraged me.
    Now, feeling strongly drawn to Prabhavananda, I had to get around my prejudice by telling myself that he was indeed an exception and not even a typical Hindu. (It is significant that I chose to think of him as looking “slightly Mongolian.”) Though I had been charmed by his gentleness, I refused to think of him as weak, so I dwelt on his youthful image as the student terrorist. Despite my own pacifism, I preferred a teacher who had been willing to use a revolver; I was glad that he hadn’t practiced mere non-violence, lying down in passive protest on the railroad tracks. And I was glad that he still spoke vehemently, in public and in private, against British imperialism.
    I am nearly certain that Prabhavananda, by the time I met him, harbored no prejudice against the British as individuals. Indeed, I often suspected that he felt more akin to us than to the Americans among whom he had now lived for fifteen years. An enemy, present or past, is more intimately related to you than a neutral can ever be.
    Besides, we shared a cultural background with him. Abanindra’s British tyrants had forced him to attend schools modeled on the British educational system, to learn to speak British English, not American, and to study literature and philosophy which was almost exclusively British. (Abanindra had found the philosophy unsubtle and materialistic but had acquired a lasting fondness for Shakespeare.)
    And now Abanindra, transformed into Prabhavananda, was actually playing teacher to two highly distinguished representatives of the tyrant race. Here were Huxley and Heard coming to him as pupils, humbly intent on learning the philosophy of his race, which their ancestors had conquered and then presumed to teach. What a victory! No, I am not being flippant. And I don’t mean that Prabhavananda was enjoying the situation spitefully. That he should have such pupils gave him genuine pride, and his pride was tempered with humility. He was constantly aware of the many things which the two of them could have taught him. He had a Hindu reverence for knowledge as such, even though much of their knowledge was of a sort which his monastic training made him regard as spiritually worthless. He really valued his association with them and continued to value it in later years when he saw them only seldom.
    But were Heard and Huxley fully his pupils, even at the beginning? Were they indeed accepting his philosophy as a whole, without reservations? No, I don’t think they were. Both of them were eclectics—continually on the lookout for fresh formulations of ideas, new items of information which they could fit into their complex individual world pictures. Neither one of them could have put himself unreservedly under the direction of a single teacher.
    And then there was the question of age. It certainly wasn’t unheard-of for a swami to have disciples who were older than himself. But the Hindu concept of the relationship does have a father-child aspect; and both Huxley and Heard may well have found this embarrassing. Gerald was four years older than Prabhavananda, Aldous was less than a year younger. Yet both of them could have belonged to a senior generation, not because they looked so old but because of their air of maturity and assurance. Prabhavananda, though nearly forty-six, was still aware of his boyish appearance; it sometimes