A BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF

INDO-ANGLIAN PROSE AND FICTION

 

B. SYAMALA RAO

 

S. K. B. R. College, Amalapuram

 

            Indian writing in English is a tree that has sprung upon a hospitable soil from a seed that a random breeze brought from afar. It is not for nothing that Rajaji described it as the gift of Goddess Saraswati to the Indians. Various Indian writers have carved out a name for themselves in different fields of its literature. Whatever be their mother-tongue many Indian writers have chosen English as their medium. Nehru wrote his Autobiography and the Discovery of India in English and not in Hindi. Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu and Sri Aurobindo wrote in English and not in Bengali. But still just as there is an American way of writing English reflect­ing their own culture and spirit, there should be an Indian way of writing English. One may copy the idiom but not the atmosphere. Language has got to be necessarily tuned to the atmosphere and spirit. That is why Raja Rao, the reputed novelist in his preface to his novel Kanthapura says, “One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own, the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-move­ment that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word ‘alien,’ yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of intellectual make up–like Sanskrit or Persian was before–but not of our emotional make up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression, therefore, has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.”

 

            “After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs.”

 

            Prof. G. D. Narasimhaiah, editor of the Literary Criterion diners from Raja Rao a little and says, “We can write only as Indians but with our spirits attuned to humanity at large.” We may go further and even state that “we should write only as Indians.”

 

            Sri Aurobindo has achieved everlasting name and fame through his inspiring and invaluable workmanship in the field of prose, poetry and drama. While his Savitri (a legend and symbol in three parts divided into 12 books of 49 cantos) is a cosmic epic and a monumental edifice in the Indian lore, his Renaissance in India is a masterpiece in prose, awakening the dormant minds into the channels of spirituality and religion. He makes an emphatic statement, “India has been pre-eminently the land of Dharma and the Shastra.” He further remarks “Philosophy in India has been the intellectual canaliser of spiritual knowledge and experience, but the philosophical intellect has not as yet decidedly begun the work of new creation.”

 

            Tagore, whose name has resounded round the world, is a versatile writer. He is often called the Bengali-Shelley. His creative genius has flowed into the free-flowing strains of mellifluous poetry, sweet drama and sonorous prose and thought-provoking novels. While Gitanjali (Song-offerings) brought him the Nobel Prize, his other works are of no less significance. Gitanjali is verily the record of the vicissitudes in the drama of the human soul in its progress from the finite to the infinite. He draws out a fine comparison of the love of an earthly father for his child and the love of God for all his children. He points out the omnipotence and omnipresence of God.

 

            Give me the strength lightly to bear

            my joys and sorrows

           

            Give me the strength to make my

            love fruitful in service

 

            Give me the strength never to disown

            the poor or bend my knees before

            insolvent might.

 

            Give me the strength to raise my

            mind high above daily trifles

 

            And give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will

            with love.

 

            Tagore’s Chitra and Post Office stand apart from his other plays. Chitra is his loveliest drama, a lyrical feast. Krishna Kripalani says, “Chitra is one of Rabindranath’s most beautiful plays, perhaps the only one that is flawless.” The imaginative perfection is made manifest in his superb play, The Post Office (which is about a child with a sick body). Thompson feels that “it is beautiful, touching, of one texture of simplicity throughout and within its limits an almost perfect piece of art.” Tagore’s genius has blossomed into full flowering in the short and sweet dialogues of this play. Words fail to sum up the exquisite beauty of this unequalled play. His novels have still that freshness and his short-stories never become stale.

 

            While Toru Dutt makes the readers share her troubles and tribulations in her delicate and short-lived career, through her artistic poetry, Sarojini Naidu lulls the readers with her sonorous lyrical excellence.

 

            Radhakrishnan, Rajaji, Nehru, Iswara Dutt, to name a few, are the outstanding writers in English who write English as it should be written. Even Radhakrishnan appreciated Nehru’s writing as a veritable Ode to the West Wind.

 

            Radhakrishnan, the philosopher-statesman, has made an indelible mark on Indo-Anglian writing with his oratorical excellence and philosophical preciseness. His style is unique and exemplary. While it contains the briskness and force, it infuses thought and inspiration. His Kalki or The Future of Civilisation in its own way is a masterpiece and makes the people aware of their position and feel their responsibilities and urges them into action. He feels that events in the various parts of the world do not encourage optimism, but they do not forbid hope. He says that the future civilisation will have to rise to a universal vision of man and human life. He writes, “Divorces are increasing in numbers and children are pushed back and forth between the parents whose only communica­tions with each other are through their solicitors.”

 

            Gandhi too exercised a potent influence on our language and literature through his own writings in English and Gujarati. His autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth is an imperish­able classic. Unlike Jawaharlal Nehru who loved English and felt more at home in it than any other language, Gandhi wrote it in his mother-tongue Gujarati but not in English. Mahadev Desai, who was close to Gandhi and studied him at closer quarters, translated his autobiography into English in such a way that one feels as if it was done by Gandhi himself, and it has a continuous influence on Indian writing in English.

 

            Nehru ranks as a superb writer in English. He has a chaste expression and flowery style. His Autobiography and Discovery of India are indubitable masterpieces whose richness increases with each new reading. Apart from the political interest they arouse in the readers, their literary value is par excellence. His sketches and pen portraits have an architectural splendour and sculpturesque perfection. In his Autobiography he describes his adventure on the peaks, “We went up and down the narrow valley bottom, flanked on each side by mountains with the snow-covered tops gleaming on one side and little glaciers creeping down to meet us.”

 

            In his Discovery of India, Nehru writes of Buddha, “His eyes are closed, but some power of the spirit looks out of them and a vital energy fills the frame.

 

            “The ages roll by and Buddha seems not so far away after all; his voice whispers in our ears and tells us not to run away from struggle, but, calm-eyed, to face it, and see in life ever greater opportunities for growth and advancement.”

 

            His description of Gandhi appearing on the Indian political horizon is full of life, “He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths; like a beam of light that pierced the darkness and removed the scales from our eyes; like a whirlwind that upset many things but most of all the working of people’s minds.”

 

            Nirad Chaudhuri has built up a reputation with his A Passage to England and Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. He has an unusual awareness of the English character and English past as well as of the English landscape. His Autobiography is almost a morbid book. His main purpose of A Passage to England is to convey a little of the beauty, of the permanence and antithesis of India and England. He writes: “In India people live at the mercy of Nature, get very little from it and take their revenge by making ceaseless war on it.”

 

            “The waters of England are like their own swans, wild in origin but cultivated in behaviour.”

 

            Iswara Dutt has made a name for himself in English writing. His My Portrait Gallery and The Street of Ink need special mention. That journalistic brilliance and appropriate phraseology, we com across very rarely.

 

            K. A. Abbas and Humayun Kabir have made significant contribution to Indo-Anglian literature by their powerful writing in English language. Special mention must be made of Nayantara Sahgal, daughter of Mrs. Vijayahikshmi Pandit and niece of Jawaharlal Nehru. Her best contribution to Indian writing is her Prison and Chocolate Cake. It is a most beautiful book in spirit, in style, in the charming and vivid picture of India. It is a book that no one could read without pleasure. And the serenely beautiful descriptions of the Indian countryside would alone make it a treasure. Writing about Gandhi’s death, she says: “Word of the assassination had leapt through Delhi like a flame fanned by wind, for soon dumb-stricken hordes of men and women had collected like sentinels round Birla House and out of every window one could see a brown blur of faces.”

 

            Among the writers of Indo-Anglian fiction R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, K. S. Venkataramani, Bhattacharya, Mohammad Ali, Kamala Markandeya and R. Prawer Jhabvala have established considerable name. Of these novelists, R. K. Narayan has a distinguished position which neither time nor influence can dare to erase. His felicity of expression and free flowing style have won for him an unshaken and unshakable place in Indian writing.

 

            Narayan’s mother-tongue is Tamil. He has settled down in Mysore, where the regional language is Kannada and he writes in English, whereas Mulk Raj Anand had finished his education in Cambridge and London. Narayan was educated entirely in South India. Dr. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar writes, “He is of India, even of South India; he uses the English language–but the thoughts, feelings and stirrings of the soul, the wayward moments of the consciousness are all of the soil of India.” He has written almost a dozen novels, short stories (An Astrologer’s Day and Lawley Road) and essays (Next Sunday). His most famous novel The Guide is adapted on the screen into English and Hindi. The most interesting of his novels are his Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The Vendor of Sweets. He is content like Jane Austen with his “little bit of ivory.”

 

            He has created the characters of his novels around Malgudi. Hence Malgudi is Narayan’s Casterbridge, but its inhabitants are essentially human and hence have their kinship with the entire humanity. His Guide won the award of the Sahitya Akademi in 1960. It is in short, the story of a sinner becoming a saint. The transformation of the selfish and lustful Railway Raju into a true Swamy; a Dharmatma, is an artistic triumph.

 

            Raja Rao is a child of the Gandhian Age. His Kanthapura and Serpent and the Rope have brought him lasting name. Kanthapura is described as the most satisfying of modern Indian novels. Dr. L. S. R. Krishna Sastry describes it as “the gamut of the whole Gandhian revolution.”

 

            Dr. A. V. Krishna Rao states, “Raja Rao has made an effective literary transcript of the Gandhian myth by artistically attuning the reality of his tale to the poetry of truth. Narrated by an Indian granny, the prose is naturally racy with a rhythmic quality and a certain poetic sensibility throughout the novel.

 

            Mulk Raj Anand has won renown for himself as the chief spokesman of the Indo-Anglian ‘literary naturalism,’ with a proletarian bias. According to him, human behaviour is determined by its social environment. The society, not character, is the destiny of man. Coolie is not only Anand’s first novel but possibly the foremost folk-epic of the Indo-Anglian fiction. Dr. A. V. Krishna Rao feels, “It is a typical novel of this oppressive trend (pro-proletarian) in modern society and becomes multi-dimensional with its philosophy of naturalism and the contemporary national ideas. But beneath the pervasive pessimism, there is an essential under-current of optimism and need for the drastic reform of the wide society.

 

            Kamala Markandeya has written several novels and her first work Nectar in a Sieve, an essay in realism, is still her best. Her other works exhibit no doubt her artistic skill and poetic brilliance.

 

            Of the present Indo-Anglian writers the name of Bhabani Bhattacharya needs special stress. He is a gifted writer and ranks with some of the best writers of India in English. His novel Shadow from Ladakh won for him the award of Sahitya Akademi for 1967. While his other novels So Many Hungers, Music for Mohini, He who Rides a Tiger, A Goddess named Cold have earned a distinct place in fiction. His Shadow from Ladakh has been written with the modern political and economic problems of India as background. He has done his job with his accustomed ease and sensitivity in felicitous English. Around the central theme, Bhattacharya has woven an eminently moving tale of the conflict of modern India.

 

            Thus Indo-Anglian writing is still a young stream rolling ahead with strength and vigour. It has an auspicious beginning. The future seems to be indistinct. Dark mountains loom ahead. But the strength and liveliness it has so far shown gives us hope that it will make its way and reach the plains.

 

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