INDIA AND WORLD LITERATURE

PROF. K. VENKATA REDDY

The concept of ‘world literature’ has been exercising the vision and imagination of literary theoreticians for about two centuries now. It is rightly felt and believed that in the spheres of culture and literature there are no great and small nations, no superior or inferior peoples, as far as talent is concerned. People of every county can be talented and make their contribution to the great treasury of culture and literature.

It is important to note that the languages and cultures, while being specific to each country and society, also articulate the human level. As Maulana Abul Kalam Azad rightly pointed out, “Politically, the world may be divided into rival camps. There may be a clash of ideologies on the plane of material interest, but in the world of the spirit, in the creations of art, philosophy, literature and other values, mankind is one”.

India, with her great ancient culture, her rich literary tradition and her unique philosophy, has been evoking a lively and profound interest since time immemorial, in different corners of the world, leaving deep imprints on the life, culture, and literature of different peoples of the world. Particularly Indian literature, which has a distinguished past, has variously influenced the development of the arts in different parts of the world. As Jose Marti, the great son of Latin America, observes, “The Ramayana inspired Iliad and Indian philosophy and history reached not only Egypt and Greece but also the Northern Europe, and out, of the Vedas the Eddas, the sacred books of Scandinavia, were made”.

Roots and laurels, life and land, time and vision, creations and continuities: from them arose the literature of India. It was the purest voice of her deeps, the dream of her reason, the dust of her ways and the waters of her rivers, the blue embrace of her seas and skies, born of leaves soaked in the dew of dawns since the days of the Rigveda.

India as a country has also been a source of inspiration to the people of many other cultures. Many British writers – Sir Edwin Arnold, Sir Richard Burton, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Paul Scott, and in our own times, Salman Rushdie–have found in the texture and colours, the simplicity and complexity of India an unendingly fascinating landscape. The poems of Toru Dutt and Manmohan Ghose, the harmonies of Rabindranath Tagore, the wisdom of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophical poetry, the lyricism of Sarojini Naidu’s verse have all contributed immensely to the wealth of world literature in English. Nearer our own times, the simplicity and clarity of Gandhi’s prose, the controlled vitality of Nehru’s “Discovery of India”, the novels of Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Kamala Markandaya, Manohar Malgonkar, Anita Desai and Arun Joshi, the poetry of Nissim Ezekiel, Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Parthasarathy ‘and Jayanta Mahapatra, the journalism of Chalapathi Rau and Arun Souri the literary Criticism of Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Prof. O. D. Narasimhiah and Prof. M. K. Nayak – all reveal the English language as a worthy vehicle of the Indian sensibility. India, too, has been enriched through contact with the literatures of other countries. This process is, if anything, accelerating, with the enormous spread of education.

In turn, India has been viewed and perceived most diversely in different countries and by different scholars, writers, philosophers, analysts, journalists, and political thinkers. Their perceptions range from enchantment to bewilderment, from being mesmerised to being baffled.

It was commonly held among the Greeks that India was the land of wisdom as, for instance, by the noted authors Alexander Polyhistor (70 B.C.). Apuleius (150 A.D.) and Philostratos (early 3rd century). The popular satirist, Lukianos (Lucian, 2nd century A.D.). in his “Runaways”, lets the Goddess of Philosophy tell Jupiter that she first descended upon “the Indians, the mightiest nation upon earth”. The legend of Alexander and the Brahmins exemplified the changing attitudes in the Hellenic world: wise men outweigh political persons. The interflow of literary ideas and motifs between India and the Hellenic world was a continuous process.

Coming to, Europe, Sanskrit was discovered by Sir William Jones in February of 1786 as “more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stranger affinity”. Three years later (1789) Jones translated the drama Saakuntala by Kalidasa into English. It awakened the highest degree of enthusiasm of leading poets of Germany like Herder and Goethe. In 1802 the German poet Friedrich Schlegel expected from India “the unfolding of the history of the primeval world which up till now is shrouded in darkness”: The Indo-European roots of Europe became her new vitality.

The discovery of Sanskrit as the prime language and its development led several nations to realise the primacy of their languages. The National Revival in Czechoslovakia, from about 1775 to 1850, was a great social movement chararterised above all by a national consciousness on the part of the people, and a drive for economic and cultural independence. The existence of linguistic connection between Czech and the ancient and perfect Sanskrit was a great encouragement to the oppressed nation in its efforts to improve its language. Czechs pointed out the close affinity of their language with Sanskrit. They cited the sentence: stara matra dati medu (Czech) = sthaviraa maataa dadaati madhu (Sanskrit). Thus were laid the foundations of modern Czech literature.

The Bulgarians were also inspired by the fact that their language was closer to Sanskrit than any language known to late H.E. Mrs. Lyudmila Zhivkova: “Here, on Indian land, Thracian art feels more at home than anywhere else outside of Bulgaria. Here one can tangibly feel the parallel, the similarity, and the generic closeness in the symbolic nature of Thracian and Indian art during the last and 2nd centuries B.C., the closeness between the symbols, imagery, and ideals in the thinking of Thracians and the people of Bharat, their common belief in the unity of the world”. The rise of modern Bulgarian literature was a concomitant of the new self-respect that the Bulgarian language gained in the preceding century.

Coming back to Asia, for a thousand years the most brilliant minds of China transcreated Buddhist literature from Sanskrit into Chinese. About 3,000 works have come down to us, alive in the stream of life. Hsuan-tsang (or Yuan Chwang) the Prince of Pilgrims to India, translated into Chinese the Prajnaparamita in 600 scrolls. The entry of Buddhist literature into Japan was their identification with the central axis of human advance. Under he impetus of Buddhis culture, all the poetry that had been written in Japan up to the 8th century was made accessible in the anthology of Manyoslm “Collection of Myriad Leaves”. The Japanese alphabet Iroha is a Buddhist poem based on the Mahaaparinirvaana-suutra. The Japanese dictionaries are quite often arranged according to the Iroha poem, and thus it is integral to Japanese education. The whole art of Japanese poetry is saturated with Zen that emphasises the significance of mu-shin or “no-mind” where we find infinite treasures of the Collective Conscious and Cosmic Conscious. The bold simplicity and essential structure of Japanese literature has an inner, guiding force that echoes forms and fantasies of India.

Magnificent monuments of Indian gnosis and speculation were translated with painstaking accuracy into Tibetan. A new Tibetan literary language was created by the lotsavas out of a primitive dialect. From the 9th to the 13th century, 4569 works were translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan. The Raamaayana Kakawin in ancient Indonesian, though based on the terse and obstruse Sanskrit Bhattakavya, has become the frozen music of words in the flow of the genius of the Indonesian poet, Yogishvara. Even to this day it is in the deeps of the Indonesian soul. Quickened and kindled by inspiration from India, Srilanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Kampuchea, Indonesia and other countries of South East Asia have developed their independent intellectual life, with patterns of great variety to be cherished and admired.

It may appropriately be underlined that studying the process of emergence of world literature could not be and should not be reduced to the study of impact or influence of “major” literatures over “minor” literatures. Literary comparativists would agree that in different literatures numerous examples can be formed of identical motifs, situational contexts and even literary plots, poetic imagery and conceptual-cum-psychological contents. Striking similarity is discernible not only in the evolution of literary genres but also in their periodical sequence in different literatures of the world. Let us fervently believe that world literature will ultimately overcome the lopsidedness and imbalance in the assessment of its diverse elements in order to achieve the congregation of literatures, in fact, of human souls.

With all my admiration and love for democracy, I am not prepared to accept the statement that the largest number of people are always right.

Speech in parliament 18 February 1953

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