A ‘MAHASADHU’ OF
LETTERS PASSES AWAY
B. Parvathi
It is with a deep sense of loss that the academic community has noted the demise of Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar on the 15th of April, 1999 just a day and a few hours away from his 91st birthday on the 17th of April. During the course of his conversation with me, R. K. Narayan referred to Iyengar as a ‘Mahasadhu’. He was a man, who like Milton, suffered total loss of vision in the last years of his life. The loss was great but the suffering was mitigated by his gentle and devoted wife, his son Prof. Ambirajan and daughter Dr. Prema Nanda Kumar who acted as his eyes and filled his world. His feeble voice and my own awe made it difficult to fully appreciate his words on sight when I went to pay my respects to him in 1997. He spoke about vision-his vision-a white sky on which shadows of people, pictures and ideas floated across. He spoke about ‘insight’, an ‘antardrishti’ which perhaps, he developed even more keenly than earlier.
A scholar steeped in the traditions of English
literature, Prof. Iyengar
bestowed equal and even more attention on the cultural, philosophical and
literary traditions of India. Well aware as he was about the critical fencing
that raged between L. C. Knights and Wilson Knight, two Shakespeare scholars,
and the English critical attitudes which, I am afraid, were exacting and many a
time harsh, Prof. Iyengar had never bothered about hair-splitting controversies
about trivialities in books or their authors. He was a critic who tempered his
scholarship with sympathy. Though a Professor of English and a scholar, he
never made the mistake of measuring either Indian writers or their works with
an English yardstick. His generous and sympathetic attitude and ability to see
them both in a positive light has nurtured a whole literature today known as
Indian Writing in English. It is not an exaggeration to say that his book
Indian Writing in English is like a scripture to students and researchers
alike. It is not an exaggeration to mention that most of the subsequent
criticism and critical opinion have leaned heavily on this book. As a very fine
critic Prof. Iyengar never missed the angles and angularities of various books
and their writers which he embedded or summed up in a few words or lines.
So simple is his tone of critical
appreciation that students and teachers benefit variously from its simplicity.
Unassuming and unimposing Prof. Iyengar has the remarkable gift of combining
objectivity with paternal tolerance towards all trends in writing and writers.
When initiation into research work was mistakenly considered as introduction to
pompous expression and bombastic words, it was not surprising for simpletons
like me to consider Prof. Iyengar’s ‘criticism’ as ‘ordinary’, because it was
understood so easily!
Only later in life was I able to understand
the difference between a critic who frightens, intimidates and subdues a
reader’s critical ability and a critic who can gently help the reader along in
the search for the essence of a work. Prof. Iyengar is a gentle critic. My
first acquaintance with his criticism was through his book on Shakespeare’s
comedies and tragedies, remarkable for its lucidity, simplicity and profundity.
Prof. Iyengar reminded me of a ‘rishi’.
‘Sahitya’ was his ‘tapas’, and though not a poet to begin with the critic in
him did tread and traverse the creative path of both the writer and his work.
The first question from his to me was always, ‘what book did you read
recently’?’ an unexpected question which made recollection of any title
impossible at the moment. The intellectual pleasure, spiritual solace and
wisdom that he found in the study of thousands of books was perhaps an ambrosia
to his soul but the sheer physical fatigue took its toll on his eye sight.
As a teacher, professor and critic Prof.
K.R.S. Iyengar will be cherished in the memories of generations of students.
His work as the Vice-President of the Central Sahitya Academy is memorable.
For more than six decades he was engaged in the pursuit of the study of not merely
Indian Writing in English but also British. American, European, Oriental and
Common wealth literature’s. His critical abilities prompted him to creative
writing also; he wrote ‘Sitayana’. The Saga of Seven Satis in verse and the
Australian Helix a collection of poems.
He once observed in a lighter vein that
writing poetry is an occupational hazard and disease for many teachers of
English-himself not exempted referring to some modern Indian poets who also
are teachers. His concluding lines in the ‘Introduction’ of Indian Writing in
English are worthy of recall. He wrote ‘Much of Indian Writing in English has
had no more than a contemporaneous significance; it meant a great deal to those
for whom it was written, though others might not have thought much about it.
Some of this writing, again, inspires in us strong emotion in terms of
personality of the writers concerned. And, fortunately some Indian writing in
English can be described as
literature by any standards whatsoever”. The following lines can be taken as a
good description of the responsibilities of a critic: “The critic has to sift
if he can the permanent from the ephemeral, the universal from the personal,
give credit where it is due, account for reputations that have since faded
away, and explain why from all this everlasting deluge of useless books - in Schopenhauer’s
pitiless phrase, some few books stand out and defy time and silence criticism.
It calls for more than scholarship and familiarity with critical categories, it
calls for perception of a high order, a freedom from prejudice, a capacity for
looking beneath the appearance, and above all a flicker of the wisdom and
insight that is more than industry and discipline and knowledge, - it calls for
the flame of understanding that is itself a renewal of life. Only Christ is the
best critic and only he is truly infallible, said Hopkins writing to his friend
Dixon. But since we cannot be Christ’s, let us atleast beware of
the money-changers, the Pharisees and the Philistines. We can at least approach
this literature with something of an open mind, not too impatient to pause, nor
too ready to condemn. May be we shall see some good in it, after all”.
The thirty five books that he wrote, eleven
books which edited, forty books to which gave his foreword or introduction and
his innumerable articles bear testimony to his stand as a critic.