AGE OF
INDIAN-ENGLISH-WRITING (IEW)
DR. K. SRINIVASA SASTRY
Am insider-outsider
IEW (the abbreviation is an indication of
the sick and sickening hurry humans are in) is ageless and ageful: partakes of
the veda (sruti, relevation, knowledge, education), the Ramayana
(the adikavya, anadikauya, ananthakavya), the Sita-Rama-myth, the
compassion ocean - universe (you reject the Sita-Rama-myth, as Mulk Raj Anand
says, or eject it, yet it is within you), the Mahabharata, the fifth veda,
and Kalidasa, the Dhammapada, the Bible and Shakespeare, the Zend
Avesta, the Koran, the Granth Sahib and so on.
Is ancient and ever-new, that is what purana
is (remember Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s The Dance of Shiva, its
subtitle, “Fourteen Indian Essays”, his essay, “Young India”, there, Nirad C.
Chaudhuri’s The Continent of Circe, its subtitle, “An Essay on the
Peoples of India”, V.S. Naipaul’s three travelogues on India)
Includes Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo,
the far-distant third, Raja Rao (the distance is the Indian earth), and so on
A comparativist calls critic - “eunuch’s
shadow”.
A localist calls critic “lesser mortal”.
Name-calling or naming is harmful-harmless.
(Literature itself is naming. Remember, to
Polonius’s “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet replies: “Words, words, words”.)
Self says to a Cambridgean: When one is into
one’s own creative agony, one’s critical effort pales into insignificance.
Johnson’s time-metaphor or Johnson’s mirror-metaphor about Shakespeare, or
another about another, creation goes and goes on, criticism goes and goes on.
And creator and critic are one. Let us approach and appreciate art or a work
of art as sui generis (svayambhu).
I happen to be a poet in English, said to be
a gift of Saraswati to India by C. Rajagopalachari. Which India, this or that?
Am full of complexes and questions to non-complexity and non-questioning.
Of compatriots, Ezekiel belongs here and does
not. (What is belonging? And who belongs where?) Ramanujan creates through
translation (literature itself is translation: non-sound sounding and
resounding inwards-and-outwards), narration, transcreation. Mahapatra
clarifies, or tries to, through ambiguity, obscurity, abstractness.
IEW, then, like all activity, all human
activity, is and is not. Kalidasa’s Sakuntala’s waist
[A statement made at 41st All India English Teachers’ (-and-NonTeachers’) Conference, Department of English, Osmania University, Hyderabad on December 31,1993].