Because of my continuing interest in Krishna, I didn’t do well enough in school to go to college.

Instead, at the age of eighteen, I got a job as a travelling salesman. I en­joyed the work very much because it gave me the opportu­nity to travel all over India.Then, in 1930, when I was twenty years old, my father decided that it was time for me to get married. I didn’t like the idea at all, but to avoid a big family argument I agreed to marry the woman my father selected for me. I became a householder and in due course fathered a daughter and a son.

During the next few years my interest in nationalist politics temporarily competed with my continuing interest in Krishna. To understand this part of my story it will be necessary to give a little background information about the conditions we were then living and working in.

The 1930’s were a time of great political unrest. The British rule of India was being challenged in many ways. There was a feeling in the air that if we organised ourselves properly and put enough pressure on the government, we could put an end to the colonial occupation. Gandhi, the most well-known of the freedom fighters, was espousing a campaign of non-cooperation and non-violence, hoping that if enough Indians refused to obey the orders of the British, they would accept that the country was ungovern­able and leave us to look after our own affairs. I didn’t accept this theory at all. I was and am a great believer in direct action and I felt that we should confront the British with a show of force. ‘If some people break into my house,’ I reasoned, ‘and take it over so completely that they have us running around obeying their orders, what should we do?’ The Gandhian answer would be, ‘Politely ask them to leave, and if they say “no”, refuse to obey any of their or­ders’. I thought that this approach was being pusillani­mous. In my experience, squatters who have appropriated someone else’s property don’t listen to polite requests. I, therefore, was in favour of picking up a stick and driving them out by force.

But how to do it? The British were very well organised and I knew that a direct physical

assault would not make much of a dent in their power structure. I decided instead to gain some yogic siddhis and then use these siddhis to attack the British.I took to frequenting a graveyard at night, my idea being that if I could summon up spirits of the dead and gain control over them, I could then unleash these forces on the British. I succeeded in summoning up an assortment of spirits and even managed to control them enough for them to do my bidding, but I soon realised that these entities had very little power and that they would not be effective weapons against the British.

Undaunted, I joined a group of freedom fighters who had decided to take direct military action against the Brit­ish. We were essentially a group of saboteurs whose aim was to conduct a guerrilla war against our rulers by attack­ing key military, economic and political targets. I was trained how to make bombs and looked forward to the day when I would see some direct military action.

Although I was not directly involved, our group was responsible for blowing up the Viceroy’s train as he was travelling to Peshawar. Our equipment was a bit primitive, for we had to rely on a fuse rather than detonation by re­mote control. The timing was not quite right and we ended up blowing up the carriage that was adjacent to the one which the Viceroy was occupying. The Viceroy escaped unhurt.