GOKAK’S MINISTRY OF LETTERS
K. R. Srinivasa
Iyengar
It is good news that Prof.
V.K. Gokak is the latest recipient of the prestigious Bharatiya Jnanapith
Vagdevi award. In fact, Gokak should have received the award over a decade ago
but for the fact he was himself for several years running president of the
Jnanapith Award Selection Committee, which ruled out his own name from being
considered. He was then at the giving end, charged with tremendous
responsibility; and he laid down and maintained exacting standards in the
selection of the winner. It is now most gratifying that he is at the receiving
end at last, and none deserves it more than the octogenarian Vinayak Krishna
Gokak, a writer of distinction in both Kannada and English, a seasoned teacher
and educationist, a thinker on his own, and the evangelist of harmony in Life.
We are almost of the same
age (he is younger by less than a year), and I had read some of his
contributions to Triveni in the
early 1930’s before I went to Belgaum to teach at Lingaraj College. Already
Gokak was a popular teacher at Fergusson College, Poona. We first met, I think,
in 1936 at an Examiners’ Meeting in the Bombay University, and our
acquaintanceship soon ripened into friendship. This for over half a century I
have been following Gokak’s career as Professsor of English at Poona and
Hyderabad, as College Principal at Sangli, Visnagar, Kolhapur and Dharwar, as
Director of the Central Institute of English (Hyderabad) and the Indian
Institute of Advanced Study (Shimla), as Vice-Chancellor of Bangalore
University and Sri Satyasai Institute of Higher Learning, and as Vice-President
and later President of Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi in short, as the complete
educationist, and as a versatile man of letters, hard work, high seriousness, a
disciplined analytical mind and a psychic sensibility that readily responds to a
variety of opportunities and challenges are among the assets and driving forces
that have conditioned Gokak’s evolution as a writer, as an influence, and even as
an inspiration.
In my early years in
Belgaum, I had opportunities of meeting and gaining the friendship of some of
the prominent Kannada writers, notably B. M. Srikantia and Masti Venkatesa
Iyengar among the seniors, and the ‘Geleyare Gumpu’ of Dharwar, the moving
spirits being B. R. Bendre, R. S. Mugali and V. K. Gokak. My colleagues at
Lingaraj College S. C. Nandimath and S. S. Basawanal - were also Kannada
scholars and writers of distinction. It is gratifying that if these Bendre,
Masti, and now Gokak have all received national recognition and acclaim as
Jnanapith Laureates.
It was in 1957 that, along
with Gokak, Umashankar Joshi, Annada Sankar Rey, S. H. Vatsyayan, Jambunathan,
Sophia Wadla and Kamala Dongerkery, I attended the P. E. N. Congress and UNESCO
East-West Symposium in Tokyo-Kyoto. During our flight in an AIR India super
constellation plane, Gokak and I occupied neighbouring seats; soon, exchanging
his aisle seat for my window seat, he was like one lost in looking out and
intently gazing at the meeting of the sky and the earth, with our own and the
plane’s median flight embracing as it were both the infinities. Seated in the
speeding aircraft, Gokak could alternately see heaven from the earth, and the
earth from heaven, and could experience several new insights about the
structure of the cosmos. I suppose this was how Gokak came to compose his
Dyava-Prithvi, which duly won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1959.
.
Gokak’s first major effort
in Kannada was Samarasave Jeevana spread out in six parts and completed over a
long period. Perhaps Gokak had Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga for a distant model.
Gokak’s latter-day novel in English, Narahari (1972) was both a summary and
something of a sequel or fulfilment as well. Samarasave Jeevana had possibly
its affiliations also with Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe, and the hero,
Narahari, is meant to symbolise ‘Harmony in Life’. In the English novel,
Narahari now grown old heads his Ashrama, the Purna Jivan Kendra, and among the
inmates is the civilian, Bheemu, who exposes himself to the other Ashramites
one by one: Seenu, Ambadas, and Arthur and Edith James. As they remember things
past-as they linger with gratitude upon the living present, Bheemu’s eyes are
opened, chords long silent begin to vibrate, and he begins to perceive the
innermost truth of things.
Listening first to Seenu’s
anabasis from the ‘Gobi desert of the intellect’ to the plenitudes of
realisation at the marble altar of the Kendra, Bheemu feels fascinated, the
scales fall from his eyes, and it is as though he is on the threshold of a new
life. Ambadas - a Titan or Olympian - affects Bheemu no less profoundly, for he
has lately come out of the dark into new light, and has turned from cynicism to
singing songs of hope and delight. Bheemu’s encounter with the Jameses is even
more rewarding, for Edith’s paintings of the world’s spiritual landscape and
Arthur’s inspired elucidations help to coax a new dawn on Bheemu’s horizon. The
inner cure, the conversion, is complete at last, and eventually he returns to
his chief Secretaryship, now ready and able to make his official work the field
of his Sadhana. His power for doing good is much greater than before, and he is
able to do his mite when the Chinese invasion paralyses all thinking for a
while. And Narahari himself holds his own as the prophet of New India.
The projection of Narahari’s
personality in Kannada as well as English is clearly a significant achievement.
But late in life, Gokak’s vision and creative impulse embarked on yet another
adventure, Bharat Sindhu Rashmi, a mega-epic in about 35,000 lines. It was
published in 1982, and was at once lauded as an epic of sweeping comprehension
and impressive articulation. For the benefit of readers ignorant of Kannada,
Gokak produced in 1984 a working summary in English along with a seminal
translated extract in verse. As compared with the original 1276 pages, the
English reader.
Bharat Sindjhu Rashmi is
about Bharat, India, and is divided, following the example of Paradise Lost and
Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, into XII Books as under:
I.
The Book of
Preliminaries;
II.
The Book of the
Ascent of Ayasya and Martanda;
III.
The Book of
Vaivasvata Manu;
IV.
The Book of
Visvaratha, the Nostalgic Traveller;
V.
The Book of
Beginnings and Ends;
VI.
The Book of
Hermitages;
VII.
The Book of the
Battle of Kings;
VIII.
The Book of the
Horse Sacrifice;
IX.
The Book of the
Expansion of Bharat Varsha;
X.
The Book of
Alienation and Evolution;
XI.
The Book of the
Integral Vision;
XII.
The Book of a
Hundred Autumns.
“This epic”, says Abhyasi, “is the story of the Vedic renaissance and of
the blending of Aryan and Dravidian cultures into a new synthesis.” The Epic
scene is peopled with a variety of characters, prophets, Rishis, kings,
commoners, and famed couples like Vasishta and Arundhati, Agastya and Lopamudra,
Jamadagni and Renuka. And King Sudesa is advised and assisted by Visvamitra
during the Battle of the Ten kings to forge out of the war a durable unity in
Bharata Varsha. But of course Visvamitra is the muscle, mind, heart and soul of
Bharat Sindhu Rashmi, and as for its Message, let me take my cue from
Abhyasi again:
Also this seminal message
of a nectarea hope for the future, as spoken by Visvamitra:
Some day, when earth
Is the Truth - Would, each
man an Avtar,
Conscious, the Finite
clasps the Infinite
And both redeem each other
for all time
And the Immortal imbues
each form of clay ...
A choice of Gokak’s English poems (original mainly, and a few translations from his own Kannada) is included in The Song of Life (1947) and In Life’s Temple (1965). Gokak has also brought out an excellent anthology, The golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry: 1828-1965, now in its seventh printing. His critical studies in English, his monographs on Sri Aurobindo and Sri Satyasai Baba, and the recently collected lectures ‘Pathways to the Unity of Indian Literature; these and other writings, whether in Kannada or English, are the result of long years of scholarship and experiential wisdom. Three hearty cheers indeed to the Jnanapith Laureate, the Hero as poet and teacher and man of letters.