THE WARRIOR-HERMITS OF SOMANAHALLI

Guru Freddy, the Belgian `Swamiji' of Somanahalli, is one of those men whose identity resists easy categorisation. You can call him a sadhu, but then he has no time to sit under a tree and meditate. You can call him a guru, but then he doesn't believe in Guru Seva, being by and large a `do-it-yourself' man. You can call him a Gandhian, but then he can teach you to kill in self-defence when your life depends on it. Guru Freddy is indeed a multifaceted man; you could even say a polymath. He can be protean in appearance as well, oscillating easily between the saffron robes of a swami and the fatigues of an army commando, beret and all.

The Nataraja Gurukula, which Guru Freddy founded and continues to direct, is quite a remarkable place. The verdant 15-acre campus, brimming with fruit trees of every kind, hugs the slopes of a craggy hillock, and is in vivid contrast to the semi-arid boulder-strewn landscape that stretches beyond it. Here and there within this little Eden, a mere one-hour drive from Bangalore, are the simple and beautiful buildings of the Gurukula, all single-storeyed and with sloping roofs of coconut leaf thatch. These huts of varying sizes blend harmoniously with their natural surroundings and are reassuringly human in scale. Entering the place, one can't help feeling that this is the kind of environment the human body was originally designed for.

The Gurukula is multidimensional, like its founder. It is at one level an ashram, a sanctuary for a small community of ascetics who live a life of contemplative action. At another level, it is an institution of learning, imparting valuable skills in mind-body integration, outdoor adventure, mountaineering, jungle survival, self-defence and eco-friendly living. It is also a resource centre for viable techniques of wasteland regeneration and social forestry. In short, it is a place with the power to transform those who visit it.

How did it all begin? What made a young man in Belgium decide to become a sanyasi and spend the rest of his life in rural India? What led him to remote Guddappana hillock near Somanahalli to start an ashram? To find out, I made a trip to the place one cool February morning. As I walked up the path that leads from the entrance gate to the Gurukula's main cluster of dwellings, I could hear birdsong, a phenomenon that is getting rarer all the time in Bangalore. A sanyasi who was working on a new cowshed greeted me with a warm smile. When I told him I wanted to meet Guru Freddy, he left what he was doing and led me to another shed. Soon Freddy emerged, in military uniform, his unsoldierly long hair tied in a neat pony-tail and hanging down from beneath his smart beret. This, together with a luxuriant white beard, made him look like a hybrid between General Montgomery and some Old Testament Prophet. He hesitated a bit to shake my hand because he had been working on the Gurukula's Jeep, and his hands had grease on them. But when he saw that I didn't mind, he gave me a firm and exuberant handshake. His face was bright and cheerful, and as he led the way to the hut that served as his office, his sprightly gait and brisk pace made it difficult for me to believe he was 63.

After some genial small talk, I asked Freddy to tell me the story of his life. He talked enthusiastically, his face registering a range of emotions as he took me on a journey across the variegated landscape of his life thus far. And quite an absorbing journey it turned out to be.

Born in Belgium a little before the Second World War, he was christened Freddy Rene Marie van der Borght. The third of seven children born to a middle class Belgian Catholic couple, Freddy was expected to become a priest. A born non-conformist, he defied parental expectation and local tradition by opting to study engineering. Later on, he went to Paris to study at Sorbonne University. As a young man coming of age in a Europe recovering from the trauma of the War, Freddy was disgusted by the hypocrisy, the selfishness, and the rampant materialism he saw around him. He soon found himself out of sync with the lifestyle of the social mainstream. He had questions welling up from deep within his soul for which he found no answers in the rationalist intellectual outlook of his time. Neither did he find any in the staid and dogmatic religious circles of the day. He started looking outwards, beyond Europe, for other paradigms about the meaning of life and how to live it in a way that was fulfilling.

Freddy soon found himself drawn to the philosophical and cultural traditions of India, which he encountered through the books he was reading. Not long after, in the early-'60s, he met Nataraja Guru, who was on a lecture tour of Europe at that time. Nataraja Guru was a disciple of Narayana Guru (1855 - 1928), the great social reformer from Kerala. The meeting sparked off something in the young Freddy. He had several meetings with Nataraja Guru, who was able to give him satisfying answers to many profound questions. In 1965, Freddy gave up his job as an engineer for the Belgian government and hit the road for India. His journey was an adventure in itself. He covered the 22,000 kms to India by jeep, passing through rugged terrain in Austria, Turkey, Syria and the Khyber Pass.

Freddy spent nearly a decade with Nataraja Guru in his ashram in Kerala. Nataraja Guru helped him to probe further his childhood interest in Christian mystics like St John of the Cross. He opened out to him the vast world of the Indian shastras, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, freeing them from narrow casteist and sectarian interpretations, and, in a manner of speaking, `secularising' them. Recognising that Freddy was no longer in tune with the dominant ethos of Europe, his guru advised him to make India his home. Freddy gladly accepted the advice and applied for Indian citizenship through naturalisation. He was granted citizenship in 1976, three years after Nataraja Guru's death. In the last year of Nataraja Guru's life, Freddy started an ashram at Erimala, near Kannur in Kerala. He blended well with the local culture and soon became quite proficient in Malayalam. In a 1994 interview he gave to the newsmagazine The Week, Freddy said, "There are three wonders in this world; a white crow, a white elephant and a white Malayali. I consider myself a white Malayali because I took Indian citizenship while I lived in Kerala." In 1984, 10 years after founding his ashram, he was forced to close it because the Kerala government acquired the land on which it stood, to start a naval academy there. Freddy was footloose again.

His determination and resourcefulness came to his rescue - "Never give in, never give up" says the Gurukula's motto - and the same year Freddy bought the land near Somanahalli where he now lives and works. In 1984 however, it wasn't the lush Eden it has now become. Denuded and rocky owing to years of illegal tree-felling and granite quarrying, it was a desolate wasteland. Freddy and his disciples, most of them foreign-born like himself, worked hard over the years, helping the natural vegetation regain a foothold, and planting saplings of a wide range of species. Today the once arid swathe of land proudly wears its mantle of green. Freddy and his disciples then underwent training in rock-climbing and mountaineering at the Himalayan Mountaineering Foundation. Soon the Gurukula began to offer courses in rock-climbing, survival training, adventure sports and so on. Word got around and, before long, the NCC, various police academies, and even army regiments got interested and the Gurukula became a regular training centre. The nominal fees charged for these programmes started to bring in some valuable revenue towards the upkeep of the institution.

As Guru Freddy brought me up-to-date on his own, and the Gurukula's, history the sound of a bell being rung drifted up to us. "That means it is time for lunch. Do join us," he said. We moved to the large hut that doubled as a dining hall and an audiovisual room. I joined the residents for lunch. We sat on mats spread out on the floor. The meal, served in steel thalis comprised ragi mudde with sambar, a staple of the average Kannadiga's diet, some rice, two different vegetable side dishes and a banana.

"We are not feeding you any poisons," said Freddy, laughing. I got the point. "You mean, no pesticides?" I asked. "Right," said he, "we are a self-sufficient community growing almost everything we need right here on our land. You can rest assured we use no artificial fertilisers and no chemical pesticides." He also told me he and his fellow-ashramites were vegetarian. "We try to live a simple Gandhian life here," he added. At the far end of the hall was a gentle European swami with a grey beard and smiling face. He was the last to come in for lunch. I learned later that he was Swami Peter, once a successful journalist in Austria and now the man who does all the cooking at the Gurukula. The simple meal we ate was his handiwork: simple, but very tasty. And, of course, highly nutritious.

After that invigorating lunch, Freddy introduced me to Mala, one of the swaminis at the Gurukula. "Mala will show you around the campus," he said. Mala is a petite young woman in a tracksuit and looks the athletic sort. She is one of the four instructors on the adventure course. As she took me around, I couldn't help marvelling how this gentle and genial woman was also quite tough. After all, she was teaching men how to be tough survivors. Mala and her fellow women-ashramites live in a separate campus about a kilometre away on the other side of the hillock.

Our first stop was a hut, which functioned as a homoeopathic clinic. A lanky blue-eyed swami named Eric, a German in his former life, is the homoeopath, besides being the man in charge of the vegetable garden. Standing beside shelves brimming with medicine bottles, Eric told me that the clinic operated in the evening every day and was at the service of the people of the surrounding villages. We moved on to the adjoining shack, which housed the workshop. Tools of various kinds, neatly arranged on shelves, seemed to announce that any mechanical or electrical emergency could be easily handled here. After all, Freddy himself is a first rate engineer and mechanic, and does all the repairs on the Gurukula Jeep himself. Mala told me that this workshop also served the farmers in the neighbourhood, repairing their pumpsets and other mechanical devices. It is also a centre for innovation in appropriate technology. Freddy has designed an improved version of the traditional ox-cart. It is equipped with brakes to handle steep descents and a device to shift the load equally on both the oxen.

Besides this, the workshop has produced innovatively designed agricultural implements. Mala then showed me the obstacle course for the trainees. It promises every trainee a rigorous, gruelling set of endurance routines that include climbing, crawling, jumping, and tightrope-walking. This obstacle course is said to be one of the finest in Karnataka. A little distance away is a cable strung at a height of 60 feet, connecting two huge boulders nearly a hundred feet apart. It is an important ingredient of the mountaineering course, and is intended specifically to teach river-crossing skills. Trainees are taught to slide across it using an improvised chair. One look, and you know at once that this is certainly not for the faint-hearted. Mala also pointed out the dim outline of the Bannerghatta reserve forest in the distance, where trainees are taken for three or four days of trekking and jungle survival training.
After this I was shown several check dams meant to harvest rainwater, useful for the growing greenery and for replenishing the water-table. Then I got to see the library, which has a fair collection of books on philosophy, spirituality, religion, psychology, Indology, science, technology and literature. The library building itself is airy and bright, with sloping coconut thatch roof, granite pillars, and mud walls: a beautiful, strong and environment-friendly structure, a model of locally appropriate, low-cost housing. The Gurukula also has a fine herd of cows and the English-born Swami David is the dairyman who looks after them. Then there is the nursery, where tree saplings of a diverse range of species are nurtured in their thousands and made available to the villagers all around, as well as to the forest department.

A hut that functions as a prayer hall has a large picture of Narayana Guru and a statue of Nataraja Guru in seated posture. The Gurukula does not profess any particular religion and lets each resident choose the spirituality he or she thinks personally suitable. Then there is a cave, which has been modified into a dwelling. Freddy himself lives there. It has pictures of Shankara and Rousseau, two philosophers whose writings mean a lot to him.

I had spent nearly a whole day here, I suddenly realised looking at my watch. It was time to leave. I went back to Freddy's office to ask him a few final questions on his philosophy of life. He told me he did not care for any spirituality that could not be integrated with day-to-day living. He has chosen to model himself after the warrior-hermits of the Mahabharata, particularly the illustrious Dronacharya. There can be no meaningful spirituality, he believes, without bodily discipline. He feels that the young people of this country, especially urban youths who are fast falling prey to alcohol, drugs, materialism and junk food, would do well with the kind of training his Gurukula offers. In a world where machines are depended on for everything, people lose their ability to handle life at a physical level. In his jungle survival courses, he and his fellow instructors teach people to fend for themselves as resourceful individuals, creatively using minimal resources to handle, with grace and peak physical abilities, the challenges nature throws at them. Such people are better able to care for fellow human beings and to live in harmony with nature. This philosophy of life, distilled from the best Gurukula traditions of India, enables people to tread lightly on the earth, preserving Nature's bounty and her fragile balance. It is an antidote to the dominant worldview of the West, where science and technology, completely co-opted by rapacious market-forces, is relentlessly destroying our planet and its inhabitants.

At the Nataraja Gurukula, Guru Freddy holds out hope to all who consider opting out of that paradigm