BOOKS AND AUTHORS

Dr D. ANJANEVULU

In the library of my respected friend and well-wisher, the late Mr. K. Iswara Dutt (Founder-Editor of the Twentieth Century), I used to see an amusing notice: “He is a fool who lends his books; and he is a greater fool who returns them.”

It took me sometime to realise that the notice was anything but amusing. I had to live and learn it the hard way. I found myself a “fool” to have lent some of my books to friends who were pastmasters in the art of flattering other people’s vanity. But I had not come across many who would qualify for the title of “a greater fool.”

One of the books thus lost by me was Krishna Kripalani’s delightful monograph “Literature of Modern India - A Panoramic Glimpse”, published some fifteen years ago (1968). I valued it not for its bulk or the impressive insignia of academic learning in the shape of quotations, footnotes, references and cross-references, appendices, bibliography and so on. Of these it had few, or a bare minimum of them. For it was a slim paperback, spare, light, easy and readable. I remember it for its sharp insights, its clear analysis, its broad, but cautious, generalisations, its bold, but balanced, assessments, as also its telling quotations, and, of course, its captivating style–informal, precise, elegant, spontaneous, unselfconscious.

I was thankful to National Book Trust, India, for its having brought this book out in a new edition, more presentable, but not much more costly, at a price of a little over ten Rupees. Only, I must take care not to play the “fool” with it again.

In this book of a hundred odd pages, with fifteen or more short and compact chapters, the author provides his own answers to a number of oft-posed questions, like: What is Indian literature, if there is an Indian literature? What is the main result of Western impact? What are the main influences on modern Indian literature? What are the basic elements that provide a sense of unity? And in which direction or directions do we seem to be going?

There are some in this country who argue that there is nothing like Indian literature, only “Indian literatures”, as many as there are (written) languages. There are others who maintain that Indian literature is one though written in many languages. In fact, this statement originally made by Prof. Umashankar Joshi, has been the motto of the Sahitya Akademi. Mr. Krishna Kripalani, who was the first Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, feels that the term “Indian literature” is likely to be misleading unless It is understood in almost as broad a sense as the term “European literature.” His own impression of this phenomenon is vivid and sensitive, as in this summing up:

“Literature of India has thus always presented a panorama rather than a scene. One has to look around and up and below, to see its many landscapes in proper perspective. If India is a land of contrasts, of sweltering heat and perennial snow, of fabled ease and brutalising want, of the wisdom’s calm and the clamour of ignorance, so is its literature many-faced – here primitive, there sophisticated, now inspired, now imitative, at once sublime and grotesque, exhilarating and trite. It is not easy to answer the question: What is modern Indian literature like? It is like literature anywhere else, and it is like literature nowhere else. A pantheon of many gods, with some of the gods many-headed and many-armed.”

Sanskrit is often dismissed, out of hand, as a “dead” language. In being dead, it has become more alive through the other languages. It supplied the element of unity to the multiple characters of Indian literature and culture. In the words of Mr. Kripalani, “It is this very multiplicity which has given an added importance to Sanskrit as a centripetal force, a unifying link that has helped to maintain the continuity and integrity of Indian civilization...”

English, which is likewise rejected as a “foreign” language, spoken by only a microscopic minority (forgetting that it is the literate, thinking minority), has had a similar role. “In an odd sense,” observes Kripalani, “English shares with Sanskrit a two-fold national role – as being equally accessible to all, irrespective of regional and linguistic affiliations, and as providing a common source, from which the modern Indian languages have drawn both stimulus and sustenance. Odd, because, in another sense, no two languages are more antithetical, in as such as no language is so rational as Sanskrit and nope so unnational as English in India.”

As for the major influences on Indian poets and writers, apart from that of Tagore and the traditional masters, Kripalani identifies three of them – Gandhi, Marx and Freud, an odd trinity. The achievement of the modern Indian writer lies in the manner in which he comes to terms with his native tradition and contemporary sensibility in finding an outlet for his genius, and retains his identity.

Was the influence of the West, in terms of literature, a measure of our propensity to go after strange gods? Not necessarily and not always. It is possible to see it in perspective, as does Kripalani. “Strangely enough”, he notes, “the attraction of English language and the knowledge of its literature (and through it of other Western literatures), instead of thwarting the development of Indian languages, have acted as a powerful stimulus....And this is the ultimate testimony to the creative nature of this impact, that all the major languages of India were fertilized by this contact and have yielded, some sooner, some later, rich harvests of their own.”

A striking example of this could be found in the evolution of romantic poetry in modern Kannada literature. Prof. B. M. Srikantayya, a patriarchal figure, who imbibed a lot from English (and Greek) and gave a lot to Kannada, can be seen as a catalytic agent in the transition from the old to the new. A teacher of English, he was a pioneer of the modern Kannada movement. His English Githegalu (translation of English lyrics.) marked a real watershed in Kannada poetry.

In the words of Prof. A. N. Moorthy Rao. “English Githegalu provided a rallying point for these forces (dissatisfied with the old). The influence of this volume has been compared justly, to that of the Lyrical Ballads in English poetry. The new movement has been called the Renaissance in Kannada poetry. Students of English literature generally refer to it as the Romantic Revolt.’

Though he was not a particularly prolific writer, as prolific writers go in Kannada and the other Indian languages, Prof. Srikantayya was a significant one. As a deep student of Shakespeare, Sophocles and Aeschylus, be “reconsidered” some of the supposedly villainous characters from the Indian classical tradition, looking at them as wronged heroes in the new light of a tragic destiny. They include Aswatthama, Duryodhana, Ravana, among others, all of whom have a heroic stature, with perhaps a fatal flaw that led to their downfall.

Thanks to the initiative of the Mysore University’s Institute of Kannada Studies under the imaginative direction of Dr. H. M. Nayak, the complete works of Prof. Srikantayya, critical as well as creative, are now available in a single volume, running to nearly 900 pages, at the incredibly attractive price of ten Rupees.

Along with a wide variety of his writings in Kannada, the volume presents, luckily for the non-Kannada-knowing reader, over 250 pages of the Professor’s contributions in English, A Handbook of Rhetoric is the longest, and probably the most ambitious of them. Meant for students as an aid to literary composition and critical appreciation of literature, it is lucid, detailed and well-documented, though necessarily pedagogic, almost pedestrian in its approach. His description of the role of the critic is marked by sympathy and understanding:

“The business of the critic is to enjoy a fine piece of work for himself and to teach others to enjoy it; to point out the merits and, if any, the defects also. He should take every circumstance into consideration, and hold it necessary, if possible, to know the author as well as the book....What is required may be more briefly named as knowledge, good sense, delicacy of taste and breadth of sympathy.”

There are lots of reviews, occasional notes and other miscellaneous writings, including one on the Kannada movement, in which he depicts the Karnataka of his time as: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead; the other powerless to be born.”

Discussing the character of Ravana in another he wonders: “What sin had Ravana committed that with all his devotion to purity, he went so mad over Queen Sita.”

Prof. B. M. Srikantayya and Dr. C. R. Reddy must have known each other at Mysore in the second decade of this century (1910-1918), when the former was teaching English at college and the latter heading the premier college or administering education. They certainly belonged to the same age group, and infused with the same spirit of “conservative radicalism”, if it could be so called Festina Lonte was their motto.

Reddy was even less prolific than Srikantayya, but equally significant in his influence on modern Telugu criticism. He had also written some pieces; or rather spoke them, and those (selected writings) were being rescued from oblivion by the C. R. Reddy Centenary Celebrations Committee of Andhra University. The first volume in this series, entitled, Some Great Lives brings together his tributes to great men from Vemana to Veeresalingam, Ram Mohan Roy to M. N. Roy, Gokhale to Gandhi and Tagore to Nehru.

His general observations at the end of his tribute to Ram Mohan Roy, could apply to other great men as well. He said:

“Each age should continue the process of readjustment. Space is limitless; time never-ending; old lights, however strong and bright, cannot reach all space and all time. Each age, therefore, must, inspired by the example of the illustrious people who in their hour and day led humanity forward, take up the burden where they left and carry it one more stage.”

The impact of Western ideas on Indian society in the last century had a role to play in accelerating the process of Indian renaissance – intellectual, literary and cultural – in various forms. One of these forms is original writing in English by Indians. The 16th century English poet, Samuel Daniel, wondered:

“Who (in time) knows whither we may vent

The treasures of our tongue? ...

What worlds in th’yet unformed orient

May come refined with th’accents that are ours.”

A history of this growing volume of writing was ably surveyed by Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar in his pioneering work, Indian Writing in English, published over two decades ago. It is sought to bring this history up-to-date by Dr. M. K. Naik in A History of Indian English Literature (not to be confused with Indian English!) in the series of similar history volumes brought out by Sahitya Akademi. He is meticulous in his data and methodical in his documentation. In prose, however, he makes only a cursory reference to brilliant journalists like N. Raghunathan, K. Iswara Dutt, M. Chalapathi Rau, Frank Moraes and Sham Lal? while devoting lots of space to so-called ‘literary men’ who write once in a blue moon. To the question “Why write in English” the most effective answer probably that was given by Kamala Das.

“Don’t write in English, they said,

English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave

Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,

Everyone of you? Why not let me speak in

Any language I like? The language I speak

Becomes mine, mine alone............

It is as human as I am human............

Early in the last century, Henry Derozio, the first Indian poet, who wrote in English, said, addressing the youth of his day:

I see.

Fame in the mirror of futurity

Weaving chaplets you are yet to gain.

Have they gained it now? One guess is as good as another.

Back