THE POET AS CITIZEN

Prof. V. K. GOKAK

I should like to speak on this memorable occasion and to this distinguished audience on the Poet as Citizen of 21st Century India. Before I do so, I should like to say how happy I am for having been selected for this honour. By the end of this year, we will be only nine years away from that challenging and baffling period. Its waters are already in our midst imperceptibly, the 20th century having split into many branches, like a river, all of them winding their way to the sea. How will the branches fare in the turbulent waters of the 21st century? Will the poet survive this change?

The old pronouncement is already there, sounding pontifical – “As civilisation advances, poetry declines.” It comes from Macaulay, that blundering pundit and prophet of New India, who indulged in half-truths believing in them as if they were whole T. L. Peacock in his “The Four Ages of Poetry,” a contemporary of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, some of whom he satirised in his ‘Nightmare Abbey,’ speaks of Homer’s Age (or of Valmiki’s and Vyasa’s) as the Golden Age of Poetry, of Virgil’s Age (or of Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti) as the Silver Age of Poetry, of the Age of succeeding poets or the Third Age as the Brass Age and the Fourth Age as the Iron Age of Poetry to which we ourselves and our own poets, who are nothing more than iron filings belong. The ominous suggestion is that poetry will be ironed out of existence in the push-button era of today or the electronic era of tomorrow. Man will be a computerised man, a robot, or a piece of computerised manipulation.

These are chilling, even killing, thoughts and we can pass on to others. It is true that science has taken tremendous leaps in the philosophy of science and in technology. Physics has reached the wonder level of Vedanta and technology has gone far beyond the magic weapons mentioned in the Vedas, the Puranas and in ancient epics. In fact it seems as though man can be assembled now like machine with the help of artificial limbs and other parts of the body. In a poem that I wrote in 1959, I said:

“Let us not breathe with iron lungs,

Eat with robot hands,

See with dead men’s eyes,

Think with electronic brains,

And feel with an engrafted double heart,

Let us not split the atom,

Only to split mankind,

Let us not burn incense

In the path of a jet,

Or rocket,

And forget the horizon,

That lifts as we arrive.”

Undoubtedly, Europe’s scientific and industrial advancement is breath-taking and so is its economic and social organisation. The European Common Market is a symbol of Europe’s fast coming together in one field. In comparison, the third world, of which we and our country are a part, presents a pathetic picture with its primitive sections of a fast-multiplying society, an emergent anaemic middle class and the “New Rich” who are out to exploit their people for their own dubious ends. If there are dreamers in the third world, as there would be, they are bound to end their days in Sanyas or Faqiri and the leaders of society have rarely the moral strength or idealistic fervour to lead it.

But no part of the world is free from its problems and perplexities. If one part of the world suffers from too little money, another suffers from too much. The western world is in the grip of three evils today – weed, woman and wine. Whether it is the first, second or third world on this earth of ours, it needs its poet, playwright, novelist or film-writer to be its friend, philosopher and guide to lead him out of evil and into the region of good.

Of the form and substance of poetry, form changes from epoch to epoch. Poetic substance also changes but not so rapidly. In his transition from the ancient and medieval to the modern world, the modern Indian poet underwent a sea-change in form. He has moved away from literary forms like ‘Chamu’ and prosodic forms like ‘Vritta’ and ‘Shatpadi’ and uses forms borrowed from the West like the novel, travelogue, autobiography and the diary and uses other forms like the epic and the lyric modifying them in some ways. Language itself has changed and he has developed new rhythms, metres and styles so that modern Indian writing wears a new revolutionary look. The air is expectant now and a little apprehensive what changes might come and upset the apple-cart of poetry.

The other key-words which might be favoured in the coming century may be anticipated to be intuitive, sensitive and expressive. The intellectual element in poetry may be reduced more and more and discursiveness or easy expansion of meaning may get replaced in poetry a little and intensive perception may get more pointedness and emphasis because it is closer to the essence of poetry. Poetry may become more and more brief and telling at the same time. It is possible that the narrative and descriptive elements in poetry which tend to be a little excessive, will gradually get separated from the seeing (pashyanti) function of poetry and be absorbed by television itself in its serial recurrence, its vivid presentation of details and its epigrammatic summation of the argument. Imagery can be actually made visible on the screen instead of narrative may be presented generally on the screen instead of being described in words. The epic dimensions of narrative may be presented generally on the screen instead of being set forth in page after page for reading. A drama may be assimilated completely in television. The dramatic, narrative and contemplative processes as parts of literature may be converted into arts both of the eye and the ear instead of being meant only for the eye. Time is of the essence of the matter, however fantastic it might sound now. If the poet and his public have begun to feel that a rearrangement of the elements of poetry is necessary in the given pattern for saving time and for falling in line with the new lifestyle of an advanced era, the rearrangement will assert itself, no matter at what cost.

Apart from intuitive perception, what are the other parts of the poet’s experience? The poet’s consciousness is like a sensitive plant. It is a touchme-not and it has in it a sensitivity which penetrates in a subtle way whatever the scenes, sights, objects or persons that it comes into contact with. It does not identify itself with them, like intuitive perception, but allows them to touch its very core. One remembers in this context the experience conveyed by “Hungry Stones”, one of Tagore’s short stories. It is the hint of a supernatural experience that haunts Tagore’s character in the short story. He spent a night in a building which had rich associations with history, sensing eerie presences there insistently. But he was unable to locate them and identify them. Similarly, one remembers lines like these from W. B. Yeats’ early poetry.

“The cry of a child by the roadway

The creak of lumbering cart

Are wronging the image that blossoms

A rose, in the deeps of my heart.”

In fact, sensitiveness, this other part of the poet’s personality, may be identified with what Herbert Read calls the common denominator of our sentiments and emotions, the dynamic and changing part of our being as distinguished from character, which is fixed and stable.

The third word which we have been considering for describing poetry, along with ‘intuitive’ and ‘sensitive’ is ‘expressive’ meaning significant or serving to express. It is that power over words which helps the poet to recreate the object as an enduring image or symbol that enables the poet to see the intuition and sensitiveness and hear them through his magic and music of words. It may be that the 21st century will not insist on any rearrangement of the elements of poetry, without compelling poets to adjust themselves to altered modes and designs. Or it may call for a reintegration. But what is certain is that intuition, sensitiveness and expressiveness inhere in the poet. They are an enduring part of his personality. When no language had developed as yet, primitive man, the one with a poetic temperament, began with the language of gestures. It is said that a master with the highest culture speaks through silence to his pupil and gives him the purest delight. The gold of silence may prevail in such moments for speech is only silver.

It is not as though the poet has a monopoly of intuition. The scientist and the philosopher draw upon it and the mystic uses it even more frequently and elaborately. The characteristic gift of the scientist is observation, that of the philosopher is discrimination. Vision is the gift of poet. The gift of mystics is the awakened and evolving consciousness. Intuition at the highest level as in Newton and Einstein, occurs in the midst of their observation. As in Shankara, Schelling and Kant, it flashes in inspired moments in the midst of their discrimination. As in Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ and in Sri Aurobindo’s ‘Savitri’ poets who developed into perfect mystics, vision or intuition pervades the writing, at the summit of the evolved consciousness or climbing towards it in the intermediate zones of Reality. Intuition helps the scientist to arrive at Truth, the poet at Beauty, the philosopher at Philosophic Truth, and the mystic at Reality from the base to the summit.

There are four types of Knowers or Seekers that have been identified so far, the poet, the scientist, the philosopher and the mystic. If we try to understand their genius at the highest level, we get into the nexus of their experience-their creative perfection of Beauty, Truth, Philosophic Truth and Reality.

A fifth type of ‘Knower’ or ‘Seeker’ may have to be reckoned with because there is a higher type of seeker or knower than the mystic or sage poet, – the Rigvedic seer or Jesus Christ of the New Testament of the Bible. They scatter cosmic truths as they go along, their utterances being seeds of new philosophies of being or new codes of enlightened behaviour. They do not care to develop them into new systems of thought or behaviour, like Dante or Sri Aurobindo. Their utterances are rounded and complete in themselves and casual as it were and need to be expanded in some directions for elucidation. These may be called prophets or revealers of God’s will if we like.

The prophet and the sage poet are makers of society. They come when a new world order is to arise and their life becomes the saga of a new world. They are not the products of centuries. The centuries themselves are the products of these prophets and mystics.

When we think of poets that as citizens, we think of the great tribe of poets that amuse, tickle, entertain, delight, instruct, enlighten or illumine us. Their durability or significance for the public lies in the measure or number of their intuitive gleams which they use for their chosen function.

There arises out of this tribe of poets, the sage-poet we have already spoken of. There is also another who is the twin companion of the sage-poet – the one whose brain is like a ball of light emitting subtle gleams all round. He impresses us as if he were the indweller of a starlit dome. Indra or Jupiter who is all eyes, having eyes all over the body, even on the palms of his hand and feet. He is the omniscient beholder and interpreter. Nothing escapes him. He sees with great dispassion in an intense gaze and sparks off its essence in a moment, be it a flower, a lovely face, ugliness itself, a villain or a hero. Who shall we mention as the poet of this starlit dome, who but Shakespeare? His brain sparkles with the electricity of spirit, emitting gleams from every point on its surface. There is no twist or turn of character that he has not portrayed for all time and no giant leap or towering sweep or personality that he has not captured for ever in words. He is the Mahendra of poets, a companion of Vyasa, Valmiki and Dante, who embodied doctrine alongside of personality and made both living.

In any phase of human evolution, whatever the ethos of century and its love of experiment, the poet fulfils the mission for which he is born, just as the scientist, the philosopher or the mystic does. The form and outward fashion may change. But the electromagnetic spirit of poetry will persist for millennia even when the evolution of a higher world order and the advent of newer and rarer types of human personality are in evidence.

I feel very happy that I have been able to write “Bharata Sindhu Rashmi”, the epic of which sage Vishvamitra is the central hero. In the two ancient epics, the ‘Ramayana’ and the ‘Mahabharata’ we do not get the thrill of his magnetic magnanimous and complex personality. It is the Rigveda that does full justice to his many-sided greatness. He was a poet. king, warrior, sage, a leader of men that transformed a small and divided kingdom like Sapta Sindhu into a ‘great Rashtra’ like Bharatavarsha with its own synthetic Arya - Dravidian culture and religion. He was one of the central figures of the Vedic Renaissance who poured new life into national moulds of thought, feeling and living.

After a hundred years of dedicated living, when sage Vishvamitra was resting, feeling that his mission was accomplished, there came to see him three cosmic beings – Mother Earth Swayam-bhuva, the Adam of the human race and Time, the incarnate old gipsy man. Time’s prayer was;

“Sage! in me a giant’s strength reposes.

The intense drama of the birth and doom of the worlds.

How it all ends, only the maker knows.

Unfold to me the polar mysteries–

Man’s destination and earth’s destiny”.

Time was perplexed and asked a burning question that was facing him each moment – the meaning of life and the future of all the worlds.

“Compassionate, the sage

Opened his lips from where he lay on the couch.

Smiling ......

What reply – sage Vishvamitra gave to Time, I had better leave unsaid, because otherwise, I might detain you too long.

Before I close this speech, I have to do a duty. I have no wish to parade the names of my masters. But I must publicly acknowledge the inspiration and guidance over the years that Sri Aurobindo, the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram and Bhagavan Sri Satya Sai Baba of Prasanthi Nilayam gave me in doing my literary work which is before the public.

Jai Hind!

(Text of the Jnanpith Award winner Prof. Gokak’s acceptance speech delivered on Nov. 1, 1991)

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