INDIANNESS IN THE POETRY OF

K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR

 

MAHA NAND SHARMA

 

            Literature as an art including poetry, like all other things in life, does not exist in vacuum. It is distinct but not different from life. It exists in life like the waves in water-­waves which are recognisable as distinct from the water mound in the river but which are nevertheless, a part of water. So is poetry not different from life and both its art and content should be in terms of life. Indianness in poetry should, therefore, be determined in the contexts of both life and literature - in the context of history, poli­tics, religion and culture as well as in the contexts of literature as art. This is all the more necessary since K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, like Gokak and C. D. Narsimiah, is not merely an individual - not merely a grain of sand among the endless sands-, but a gigantic force in life and literature - a force thrown up by the history of this country and Indo-Anglian literature with the dawn of independence. Like the other two, Iyengar, with the genuinely Indian ethos of his writ­ings - particularly poetry, has chartered for the Indian writers in English a course which they should follow and are destined to fol­low with the increasing recognition of its true identity by this nation.

 

            The contexts being fixed, let us turn straight to the question: ‘What is Indianness?’ Indianness is a culture rooted in the ancient myths and history and religion of the vast majority of Indians. This culture assimilated and absorbed even the ways and customs of some tribes such as the Sakyas and the Huns but, for all the wishful thinking of pseudo-secularists, it could not absorb and assimilate fully the Islamic culture. This fact very clearly emerged in the partition of the country and is manifesting itself more and more in the emergence of the Hindu wave in the North and parts of the south also. Needless to say, that the discovery of their ancient roots by an increasing number of Hindus, as reflected, in the emergence of B.J.P. in northern states, will establish the continuity of our culture with our glorious hoary past. The Christian and the Moslem nations of which the most have always enjoyed freedom and uninterrupted continuity of their culture exemplify clearly that such continuity of culture strengthens and sustains the freedom of a nation. Iyengar’s poetry is a national asset because it sustains this continuity.

 

            The Indianness, explained above, has its roots in Iyengar’s childhood and boy­hood. As a student, he had studied the Ramayana and learnt Sanskrit in school and college. He used to listen to the cantos of Valmiki Ramayana from his maternal grand­father and two of his granduncles were pro­found scholars of Sanskrit. His parents and his aunt used to read the Sundara Kanda everyday.

 

            The Indianness, ingrained in Iyengar’s character, has passed into his poetry also. His first poetical work, Musings of Basava: A Free Rendering (1940), written in collaboration with S. S. Basawanal, ex­presses in lyrics like those of Surdas, the spiritual longings of the great Indian Saint, Basava. The last line of many lyrics, consti­tuting a kind of invocative refrain, emphasizes this longing by its repetition and metrical abruptness. Although the lyrics are render­ings, they have the spontaneity of Basava himself because Iyengar’s soul has become one with that of the saint:

 

            The Great Illusion

            in varied ways

            It keeps me in thrall.

            Shall I never break through Its

            maddening spell

            O Lord, Kundala Sangam:

                                    (Musings of Basava, 55) (Emphasis mine)

 

            While Musings of Basava (1940) presents spirituality as embodied in the ver­bal outpourings of the saint, his next po­etical work, Tryst with the Divine (1974) portrays it in action in the typical Indian surroundings of the Ashram of the Mother (Mirra). Of a girl from Mexico in the Ashram, he says,

 

            She gives no thought to frills, but seems intent

            on tracking down ‘The Real’.

                                    (Tryst 20) (emphasis mine)

 

            He describes the people who have come to the Ashram for the spiritual cure of their materialistic diseases:

 

            For thousands this evening’s

            appointment

            is of mighty consequence.

 

            How many derelicts and drug ­addicts

            have come, hoping for a cure.

                                    (Tryst, 19)

 

            In his next work, Microcosmographia poetica (1978) which partly resembles Alexendar Pope’s Essay on Criticism in theme, if not metre, his ap­proach to the criticism of poetry is basically Indian. According to Indian Aesthetics, rasa is divine (Rasa is the Universal spirit). Iyengar expresses this idea as following:

 

            The poetic word is the mighty echo

            of the breath of a great soul

                                    (Emphasis mine)

           

            Elsewhere also, he says in the same work:

 

            of what use are a thousand criteria

            when there’s no link with the soul?

                                    (Micro 24)

 

            In his two subsequent works of po­etry, Leaves from a Log (1979) and Aus­tralia Helix (1983), spirituality peeps through a number of poems but its trappings become foreign almost wholly in Australia Helix and partly in Leaves from a Log in which the books I -III present the British lo­cale and the books IV-IX present Indian surroundings. Notwithstanding the foreign trappings of the theme in Australia Helix, the poet implicitly expresses his opposition to western materialism in poems such as “Latchkey children” in which he portrays the children developing mechanical habits and not receiving sufficient attention and love from the parents working out of doors. Some poems in books I-III in Leaves from a Log have intensity of British atmosphere. How­ever, the books IV-IX return to Indian trap­pings.

 

           

            It is in his three latest monumental works. The Epic Beautiful (1983), Sitayana: Epic of the Earth-born (1987) and Satisaptakam: Saga of Seven Moth­ers (1990) that the trappings as well as the theme are basically Indian. It is as if he has finally returned to the lap of absolute Indianness in which he was born and bred and in which he developed in his childhood, boyhood and youth. In Satisaptakam the last but the best poem, “Kanniki”, which is a commendable effort towards the enrichment of the North where the people are mostly ignorant of the intrinsic richness of the lit­erature in Southern languages.

 

            It is unnecessary in this brief discus­sion to go into the details of Indianness in his latest works because it is prominently reflected in their titles. But a point, made by Professor Kantak in his article “A ‘Sitayana’ for Today”1 deserve close atten­tion. According to him, it is doubtful whether the modern generation will receive Sitayana with its character of Rama and its portrayal as enthusiastically as it deserves to be re­ceived. It is because the modem genera­tion will not relish Lord Rama’s expulsion of Sita simply because of a washerman’s remarks to his wife against her. I think there should be no difficulty in the enthusiastic reception of the character of Rama in Sitayana by the modem generation if modern criticism explains to the young mod­em readers of Sitayana that their modem approach to Rama is the same as the spiri­tual Indian approach to him with only this difference that while the spiritual approach proceeds positively, their modem material­istic approach arrives at the same point negatively and, in the process, distorts itself in evaluating creative literature. The spiri­tual approach to Rama looks upon him as imperfect just as the modern approach does. According to Indian spiritual approach, the spirits, when imprisoned in the body, comes to be dominated, against its will, by the im­perfections of the latter. Rama is looked upon by Indian spiritualists not as a perfect incarnation of God but as an embodiment of only twelve out of his sixteen phases. However, the difference between the spiri­tual and the modernistic approach arises when the latter tends to condemn the whole character of Lord Rama for his expulsion of Sita, which is unjustifiable from the compas­sionate point of view but justifiable from the view point of his higher duty as a king which demanded full sensitiveness to public duty as a king which demanded full sensitiveness to public opinion.2 However, even if the modernistic attitude does not reconcile it­self to this justification, the modernist should bear in mind that Rama, not with standing the accumulation of hundreds of myths around him, is a historical figure, and po­etry being the imitation of life, he will have to be presented as such. Iyengar himself, would have been a fault in Sitayana if Rama had been the hero. But this epic, like the comedies of Shakespeare, has no hero at all. It has only the heroine which is Sita, the blameless wife. Therefore, Rama’s imper­fection, duly portrayed in Sitayana should increase our appreciation of Sitayana be­cause his imperfection alone, by its contrast with sita’s perfection, brings Sita into the prominence of a heroine. Needless to say that Rama’s imperfection which his life itself provides as material to the artist and which the artist rightly uses here, is a source of the merit of Sitayana in which the pathos in the remorse of Rama at the end resembles that in Bhavabhuti’s Uttar Rama Charitam.

 

1 Indian literature XXXII, 1 (1981) pp. 101-27.

2 Even in England, the elder brother of George VI had to abdicate the throne for his decision. to marry a widow washer woman, Mrs. Simpson, because, as the Prime Minister, Mr. Baldwin rightly said, “The king is the king of his subjects and therefore he will have to marry according to the wishes of his subjects”.

 

 

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