Griffiths: Twilights of the Raj

Abstract

Dom Bede Griffiths (1906–1993), was an Anglican convert to Catholicism and an English Benedictine for over twenty years. He spent the last twenty-odd years of his life, however, in South India, first Kerala and then Tamil Nadu, as an independent religious community leader, loosely affiliated successively to the Benedictines, Cistercians and Camaldoli. Though he read Sanskrit, Griffiths never learnt to speak an Indian language, retained a British passport, and was at times in danger of being denied a residence permit by the Indian authorities. Nevertheless, he was less a missionary to the Indians, than a guru to the West. He was the prophet of a marriage between Indian intuition and European reason, which should give tired Occidental Christianity new meaning through an infusion of Oriental mystery, a fresh sense of the sacred, as Kathryn Spink called it.