A Man on Foot

(See Cover)

The farms around Benares, India's holy city, are nourished by the sacred Ganges. The soil is black and crumbly, as rich-looking as chocolate. Cane grows as high as a man's head. Water is knee-deep in the lush paddies. It is a happy land, where plump little children stand beside the road, laugh and wave to passing automobiles, where slender farm girls, with water jars balanced gracefully on their heads, smile shyly before covering their faces with colorful head cloths. Old men sit in the doorways of mud huts, contentedly puffing on long-stemmed hookahs.

But as the traveler goes on across the sluggish River Son, then turns south into the state of Bihar, the landscape begins to change. The land is dry and almost desert-like. Scattered here & there, like the bare bones of long-dead hills, are piles of gigantic stones. Jackals wander across the fields, and black kites wheel lazily in the sky. Tiny villages huddle beside the road, and when an automobile approaches, naked children cower in fright, then invariably, as panicky chickens do, dart into the car's path. Gaunt women, stripped to the waist, work in the fields.

Trudging across this bleak land last week, surrounded by adoring crowds wherever he went, was a gentle, half-deaf little wisp of a man, dressed in the garb of poverty—a homespun dhoti and cheap brown canvas sneakers—but lighted by a flame of authority that has made him one of India's most notable spiritual leaders. His name is Vinoba Bhave (pronounced bah vay). He has no place in the government or any other secular organization; he is what Hindus call an acharya (preceptor). Only a land with holy cities, sacred rivers and thin margins between want and plenty could have produced frail (5 ft. 4 in., 86 Ibs.), ascetic Vinoba Bhave. In two years he has become such a power in India that only Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru is better known to the Indian masses.

New Urgency. Vinoba, as he is known to millions, was a trusted and faithful disciple of the late Mahatma Gandhi. He even looks somewhat like Gandhi, except for a grey beard and frowsy dark hair. He has the same emaciated body, wears the same sort of bifocal glasses, speaks in the same calm, soft voice, with kindly humor. One of the most learned men in India, he has studied Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, Kanarese, Malayalam and English, and this array of languages serves him well on his travels through polyglot India. It is not for his learning, however, that India's millions have given their hearts to Vinoba Bhave. They have done that because he, like their beloved Bapu (as they call Gandhi), has brought them a new hope.

It is no new doctrine that Vinoba preaches. It only seems so, because the times have given it new urgency. Walking from one to another of India's 700,000 villages, he asks those who have land to share it with those who have none. Without using the words of the gentle Evangelist who preceded him by two thousand years, he tells his audiences that it is more blessed to give than to receive. To those who have land he says: "I have come to loot you with love. If you have four sons, consider me as the fifth, and accordingly give me my share." To impoverished tenants and landless laborers he says: "We are all members of a single human family."