Dr. D. V. GUNDAPPA

His life and Achievements

Prof. L. S. SESHAGIRI RAO

[The Birth Centenary of Dr. D. V. Gundappa, eminent litterateur, savant, a polyglot, a great patriot, a prominent social worker and founder of the Gokhale Institute of Public Affairs, was celebrated under the joint auspices of the Sahitya Akademi, Delhi and the Government of Karnataka, at Bangalore on August 29, 1987. It was inaugurated by Shri Ramakrishna Hegde, Chief Minister of Karnataka. A seminar was organised on the 30th and 31st when eminent men of letters read papers on different aspects of D. V. G. The following paper read at the seminar is reproduced with the kind courtesy of the Sahitya Akademi.

–Editor]

Men of letters are of two types. There are those who fulfil themselves solely or mainly in creative writing. There are others whose literary works are just some of the rays radiating from a central flame. These are essentially men who are involved in the process of purposeful living, men of endeavour and action, and their writing is a form of action. They are bigger, very much bigger than the sum total of their writings. They are architects shaping their lives, and writing is a means to an end. The great man to whose memory we are paying a tribute today belongs to this category. Poet, critic, biographer and master of prose, the President of the Eighteenth Kannada Literary Conference, DVG was also a member of the Mysore Legislative Council, a member of the Mysore Political Reforms’ Committee, the first President of the Mysore State Journalists’ Association, and the President of the First All Karnataka Journalists’ Conference. When Sir M. Visveshvariah was elected President of the South India People’s Conference in 1929, he insisted that DVG should be his secretary, not because he was an eminent man of letters but because he was a knowledgeable writer on political issues, a man of un-impeachable integrity, a man who could think clearly and express himself with precision and without rhetoric, and a man who could work in a team. This translator of Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam was also the author of “The State and Their People in the Indian Constitution” and “The Case of the People of the Indian States.” He gave the Kannada readers a unique poem: “Mankuthimmana Kagga”; he gave the people of Karnataka a unique institution; The Gokhale Institute of Public Affairs.

“To make the world a better place to live in” – the expression has become a cliche. But to DVG this was the sole justification of life. He once made a startling statement: “All that I have done these sixty years is to be a journalist. All that I have written, be it on politics or philosophy, be it literature or music, be it in prose or verse, all that I have done, be it in the Legislative Council or elsewhere in public life, is just journalism in one form or another.” But what was journalism to him? He conceived its mission loftily: “As the policeman keeps awake the whole night in order that citizens might sleep in peace, as the soldier stands firm on the battlefield that his countrymen might live in security, the journalist has to shed all thought of comfort and has to toil so that all people may live happily.” He was a creative writer, but also a responsible citizen and a sentinel.

Dr. Gundappa was born in Mulubagal, some sixty miles from Bangalore, in Kolar District. He came from an orthodox family, not too fortunate in worldly matters. He could not pass the Secondary School Leaving Examination. Married at the age of 16 or 17, he tried his hand at a number of professions – as a teacher, a company agent, a vendor of stamp papers and so on. For a time he found refuge as a clerk in a factory for painting jutkas, that is, carriages drawn by horses. The salary was ten rupees a month. But even this haven he lost after four months. But fortunately, his work here had brought him into contact with journalism, and he now became a journalist.

I do not propose to narrate in detail the story of his life, although the temptation is strong. After a brief spell in Madras he settled in Bangalore. His articles brought him to the notice of Sir M. Visveshvariah, then the Dewan or Chief Minister of Mysore State. DVG’s forthright views expressed in his own English bi-weekly, the “Karnataka”, displeased even his friend, Sir M. V. DVG grew interested in the country’s affairs. His writings drew the attention of men like the Rt. Hon’ble Srinivasa Sastry, and he became more and more involved in public life and discussions. He began with an admiration for British rule but soon grew disillusioned. He was a disciple of Gopalakrishna Gokhale who epitomized for him the ideal citizen – a man of integrity, of independent thought and sober action. He was like his master, a Liberal. He believed in equipping himself for any task he undertook. The Government nominated him to the Bangalore Municipality and then to the State Legislative Council; he was also a member of the Mysore University Senate and its Council – this man who had never stepped into a college as a student. Later the university honoured itself by conferring the D. Litt. degree on him. In 1969 he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his Srimadbhagavadgeetatatparya athave Jeevanadharmayoga. Incidentally, his son, Dr. B. G. L. Swamy, received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978, for his Hasuru Honnu.

As the passing years made the inevitability of the dawn of independence clear, DVG felt that the youth of the country should be trained for the responsibilities of freedom. The struggle for freedom demanded heroism, freedom itself demanded wisdom. With the young men who clustered around him he discussed the problems of a free India. He stressed responsible citizenship. Once, when I was with him, a bunch of young men came to complain that water supply to their locality was irregular and inadequate. They wished to complain to the authorities. He said, “Have you ascertained how much water other parts of the city are getting? If an officer asks you how many houses there are on a particular road in your locality and how many street taps there are, can you answer him?” It was this man who founded the Gokhale Institute. And its work filled quite a considerable part of his life thereafter.

DVG’s work brought him into contact with eminent men like Sri V. S. Srinivasa Sastry. P. S. Shivaswamy Iyer and T. R. Venkatarama Sastry, and powerful Dewans of Mysore State like Sir MV and Sir Mirza Ismail. He won their friendship and regard. But he was never affluent. Yet he declined all offers of Government employment. He often assisted Sir M V; and Visvesvaraiah was not a man to accept free service. He sent cheques; DVG protested. Sir MV insisted; so DVG accepted the cheques–but never encashed them. Indeed, it was not in his nature to encash any service he had rendered. From those who knew him intimately, we have it on record that for years his wife would not visit neighbours because she did not have a decent saree to wear. Some of the letters which passed between DVG and his son BGL Swamy have been recently published. They show both how DVG was in financial straits and how he struggled not to be a burden to his son. In one letter he writes “You know the maintenance of this Chatram called our family depends on your cheque. In all seriousness I would ask you to look on this monthly expenditure of yours as an act of Dharma .... It is no pleasure to be such a drain on your funds. I have been thinking of a way of managing without being a burden upon you. I must soon find a way but how soon I shall succeed I cannot say. I await the mercy of God.” And yet, when his fellow-citizens presented him with a purse of a lakh of rupees he made over the entire amount to the Gokhale Institute. Even the five thousand rupees he got with the Sahitya Akademi Award went to the Institute.

DVG was probably never totally free from financial worry but yet he was always a cordial host and a genial man. In later years he became an institution and a savant, and had visitors from all walks of life. Men of letters, sometimes from other parts of the country, Sanskrit scholars of repute and teenagers from colleges, a batch of young men and women from Gujarat or from Germany, journalists from Mysore or Madhya Pradesh–he never knew who might call on him. The interpretation of a verse from the Rig Veda or from Shakespeare, the ethics of journalism or the propriety of the utterance of a leader, the beauty of a couplet in Kalidasa or of a song composed by Vasudevacharya, values in education or a delicay which was popular fifty years ago–you might find any subject under the sun being discussed in his room when you walked in. And the most serious discussion of the most abstruse subject would be punctuated with loud laughter, often provoked by the old man’s own comments. He could laugh at others, and he could laugh at himself.

The man made one feel younger. Even at eighty-five he remained young, and his enthusiasm was infectious. He was not a revolutionary; his speeches were not thrilling; but one felt one was in the presence, not of a rich man, but of a rich personality. His words came from a mind irrigated by the twin streams of knowledge and experience. And he was rich in the friendships he had acquired and the respect and affection he commanded. The lad who had been unable to pass the SSLC Examination, had come a long way. And whatever he had, he earned by hard work. To give a simple instance, there was his English, I often wondered at his command of English. Even in conversation he chose the right words and used them with such precision. He had mastered a foreign language by sheer effort. He had the hall-mark of the true scholar – the devotion to precision. I think his philosophy can be summed up in two statements he himself made. Once, someone said to him, “All the world praises Mr. So-and-so; just go to his house now and see what’s going on,” DVG’s answer was, “Why should I take upon myself God’s work? It’s for God to judge. Let each man find comfort where he will, it is not for me to judge.” And, speaking about a certain Dr Achyuta Rao he says, “He believed that God had made honey and given man lips, in order that man might bring honey and lips together.”

Apart from making life a continuous process of enrichment what did DVG achieve?

There is, of course, the Gokhale Institute, a visible symbol of his sense of civic responsibility, and a tribute to one man’s vision. He was averse to all recognition. When a periodical published a laudatory article on him, he wrote, “Such praise of a living man is ill-advised.” As long as he was alive he would not permit the City Corporation to name the road where he lived, after him. And yet he agreed to a public felicitation. I think the only reason was that it would bring a purse of a lakh of rupees which he could donate to the Institute. Today it has a library of more than 80,000 volumes, and these include some rare classics. It is one of the centres of cultural activities in Bangalore.

It is not for me to assess DVG’s work as a legislator or his political thought. But I must mention his contribution to Kannada through the Kannada Sahitya Parishat. The Yuvaraja was the President but the Vice-President was really in charge of the institution. Those were days when the Parishat had but meagre funds and yet as Vice-President, DVG added new dimensions to its work. I wish to mention just two schemes. In a country where the overwhelming majority were illiterate, he saw the “gamaki” a man who could render poetry effectively, as a link between the poet and the reader. He started training classes in gamaka; the gamakis were trained to render not only, the classics but modern poems. Secondly he organized the Vasantha Sahityotsava in a highly imaginative way. He realized that, sooner or later, the language of the people had to be the language of instruction. He invited professors of the university to speak in Kannada on the subjects of their specialization and got teachers from all over the state to attend. Sceptical professors and diffident professors were soon looking for technical equivalents in Kannada.

DVG is one of the Navodaya, that is, Renaissance, writers. These writers formed the bridge between the literature of the pre-Modern Age and the literature of the Modern Age. From the west, ideas, books and challenges came flooding the mind. These writers had, like Ishwara arresting the devastating onrush of Ganga, to arrest this flood and to ensure that they and their generation were not swept off their feet. They were steeped in classical Sanskrit and Kannada in literatures, and Indian philosophy. H is to the credit of this generation that it absorbed the shock and shaped a new and forward-looking literature without sacrificing into inheritance. DVG belonged to this generation.

So far as I know, the first serious discussion of the nature and role of literature, in the Navodaya Age, was in a talk given by DVG in September 1920. The talk was subsequently published with the title, “Sahitya mathu Janajeevana”. The first observation he makes is this: most Kannada poets sustained themselves in borrowings from Sanskrit; contemporary poets have little knowledge of the world they live in. Therefore, says DVG, if a man should say, “If I do not know Sanskrit I lose something; if I do not know English, I lose something. But what do I lose if I do not know Kannada, we have no answer.” DVG insists on the contemporary relevance of literature, and on the close relationship between the literature of an age and the social environment in which it takes shape. To quote him, “Where the life of the people moves vigorously towards many goals, purposeful and meaningful writing will appear. But where the life of the people is bereft of heroism and magnanimity, where the people are immersed in mere sordid toil, great poetry cannot be born.” And of the language he says, “This is a lesson Kannadigas will do well to remember; the more precise our understanding of our political and economic duties the more earnest the implementation of them, the better and stronger our language becomes.” Even more interestingly, he asserts that the same inspiration shaped the founding of the Indian National Congress, the vision of Sir M V which led to the construction of the Krishnaraja Sagara Dam, the research of Sir Jagadishachindra Bose, and the poetry of Rabindranatha Tagore.... The process of the nativization of Western poetics is at work here. The mind moves freely from Anandavardhana to Gilbert Murray, and examples are drawn from Kalidasa and Shakespeare. DVG quotes the Sanskrit verse “Niyamakriti niyatirahitam”, etc., and immediately adds, “This is the view of Western writers on poetics, too.” Referring to the Renaissance Age of daring acts and adventurous thought, the age from which a Shakespeare emerged, DVG reflects, “Such must have been the age of Vyasa also”. Speaking of creative writing he observes, “If poetry is to be sweet to the lips and the ears of the reader, its language must be graceful; if it is to appeal to their intellect it must have weight of content. If this is to be achieved poetry needs the discipline of the Indian poet and the unfettered thought of the English poet.”….. Behind his exposition of the power of poetry are the well-known Indian concept of “kanthasammithi” and Shelley’s assertion that the imagination is at the root of all morality.

Since separate papers are being presented on the creative and critical writings of DVG, I shall not be so presumptuous as to attempt a detailed study of either. But for the sake of completeness I shall take the liberty of offering some observations. DVG’s reaction to the Western influence as a creative writer is also one of rewarding assimilation. The biography was one of the forms which came to Kannada at the time of its Renaissance. DVG has given us some excellent biographies. A study of an early collection of his poems, like “Nivedana”, published in 1924, is interesting. The lyric came to Kannada from English literature (except for the devotional outpourings of the Vachankaras and the Haridasas). The pioneers were faced with the task of finding the right metres and diction for the new form and spirit. Here is a young poet, flexing his literary muscles, as it wore. The metres he chooses are indigenous metres, like the “seesa”, the “kanda” and the “shatpadi”; but the spirit is modern, I would particularly refer to the poem, “Belurina Shila Balikeyaru”. It is an ode addressed to the lovely nymphs who adorn the brackets in the Channakeshava Temple in Belur. The stanzas are regular in the sense that the metres are clearly defined and recognized, like the “kanda” and the “vritta”; but all the stanzas do not employ the same metre. Though the metres are native Kannada metres the total form, the ode itself, is the gift of English poetry. The poem is reminiscent of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. It contains the Kannada rendering of a line from Keats’s ode, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”; it glances at the famous words, “Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty”. But more important than these technical experimentation and Keatsian influence is the spirit of the poem. The temple is conceived as the mansion of the bewitching beauties in love with the Vishwashilpi, proclaiming the “mantra” of “sarasa jeevana” or a life of aesthetic joy. God is neither Power nor Justice nor even Mercy here; he is the Supreme Lover, the Fountain of joy. It is a distinctly individual response to life, not didactic but moral in the best sense, in the sense that it recognizes the enrichment of life as the highest worship.

The word often used to describe DVG Is “dheemantha.” The epithet finds full justification in a poem like “Mankuthimmana Kagga.” It has proved to be one of the most popular poems in the language, and in the course of forty-four years has seen eight editions. The poem has a frame; also, the opening verses capture the vision of a vast universe in which millions of lives are engaged in a frenzied dance, a universe of awesome clashes and invasions, a universe of balls of fire and of terrifying abysses. The questions are asked: What is the goal of man, inhabitating such a universe? What is his worth? His end? What is the meaning of it all? It seems to me that the rest of the poem is to be read in thils context – of a sentient and intelligent being in an immense universe in which inscrutable forces are at work. In every section the speaker-viewer shifts his point of view, but informing the entire poem is a central vision of the meaningfulness of life, even when viewed in the frame of the vastness of the universe and the immensity of Time. Again and again the reader feels as if a button has been pressed and a light flashes forth. The best parts of the poem achieve a balance of thought and feeling, a balance, to use a cliché, of the head and the heart.

A few words about another important work, and I have done. This is the eight-volume “Jnapaka Chitrashale.” This was the work of his later years. In fact, the last volume was a posthumous publication. The work can be viewed from several angles – as reminiscences, as cultural history, as a gallery of portraits, as sparkling and thoughtful prose. Here is an elderly man of letters, his mind steeped in Indian thought and literature, writing with a sheer delights in the wealth and variety of human nature which reminds one of the Shakespeare of the comedies, of Ben Jonson, of Goldsmith and Jane Austen and Dickens and Bernard Shaw. The vitality, the enduring strength of a people manifests here in a hundred forms, in people of all castes and social levels. DVG is aware of how much of injustice, cruelty and stupidity there is in life; but his eyes are fixed on the goodness and culture of people. Charity and magnanimity characterize the re-creation of this teeming world. And at the end of it all, he helps us retain our faith in and respect for man. It is a vision of ripeness which makes life worth living, of inner strength which makes life bearable; it is a brave vision for which one is grateful to DVG.

Certain aspects of DVG’s writings may strike a later-day reader as limitations. Thus, in his recorded response to life it seems to me that he does not reckon with Evil. Not that he was unaware of its presence or its power. But, in his vision of the flowering of the spirit the withering power of Evil does not receive the attention it ought to. In fact, it seems to me that this is the limitation of most of the writers of his generation. Secondly, the vision focuses on the ripeness of the individual spirit; but the society it takes for granted is a static society and, it seems to me, the problem of social change is scarcely recognized.

But despite these limitations, DVG’s legacy is a great legacy; we may repeat what Dryden said of Chaucer! “Here is God’s plenty.”

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