The Telegraph
January 22, 2014
Bhau Kalchuri, who has died aged 86, was an Indian writer and poet, and the biographer and close disciple of Meher Baba (1894-1969), an Indian guru famous for, among other things, not uttering a word during the last 44 years of his life.
Meher Baba, also known as “The Compassionate One”, claimed to be the Avatar — the most recent incarnation of God, following in the footsteps of such figures as Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed.
Attaching no importance to “creed, dogma, caste systems or religious ceremonies and rites”, he boiled down his teaching into a list of “realities” that included love of God, self-sacrifice, respect for others, self-discipline and calm in adversity. He taught that true self-realisation comes about over millions of reincarnations — a process he called “involution”. For the last silent 44 years of his life, he communicated with an alphabet board and eventually only with hand gestures.
Baba’s teachings caught on in the West, where he became something of a celebrity. In the 1930s he travelled to America and hobnobbed with Hollywood stars such as Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, Tallulah Bankhead, Boris Karloff, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks junior He also travelled to Britain on the same ship as Mahatma Gandhi. The pair were reported to have had several meetings at which (according to his followers) Baba advised Gandhi to abandon politics, provoking a sharp response from an aide to the Mahatma: “You may say emphatically that Gandhi never asked Meher Baba for help or for spiritual or other advice.”
