CREATIVE WRITING IN INDIA

Prof. WILLIAM HOOKENS

There was a zealous search for a needy litterateur by the well-wishers of Gwalior, and after a week’s (of what they called a futile) search, the conclusion that this search-party came to was that there is no needy litterateur! It was no small wonder when this was known to the well-known litterateurs, and they all took up the challenge and said their say without mincing words. Some were so enraged as to call it a propaganda stunt, whereas others who were inclined to keep calm nevertheless said their say in no unequivocal words. How can there be needy litterateurs in Gwalior or for that matter, in the country, they asked, when they have taken to occupations to keep themselves alive, much to the detriment of their individual talents! It was a great pity and shame, they said, to allow this to happen and to see creative writing dead or almost dead in the country! Litterateurs, all said and done, were men and women who needed food, clothing and shelter and, much as it is said that difficulties increase the potentialities of the writers, there must be the minimum comforts or amenities provided. But who is to listen to the woes and groans of the needy litterateurs when all and sundry are busy worshipping the raising sun?

One is reminded of the famous letter of Dr. Johnson to the great Lord Chesterfield who did not so much as condescend to help Sam in his difficult days and came to his aid when needed his patronage no more. But such is the way of the world–the world of phillistines who have more money than brains and try to buy culture and even put price-tags on men and women of culture. And all that we can say of them is that, like Soamaes in The Forsythe Saga, when men of property try to buy off even their wives (whom they use like chattels) there is bound to be trouble, for no man and woman worth their salt would ever like to be bought off. Personality is a sacred thing and an individual is almost like a temple but then in this world of mechanisation all is grist to the mill and nothing is sacrosanct. Patronage is good if the patrons are for improving the output of the writers but it is an evil when writers are used as means to undesirable end and writers of quality will rather die than sell their birthright–freedom–on which depends their whole creative edifice. Coming nearer home I felt it was a shame to pay compliments to the poet Makhan Lal Chaturvedi of Khandwa, and those who have showered him with honours and money probably know well that he has not long to live–and one would have expected these awards or rewards when a writer can enjoy them. It is almost like inviting a patient who is on diet to a banquet! We are a strange people, selfish to the core, impulsive by nature and showy as a race! What about Nirala who died poor and now every mother’s son in this country showers him with posthumous fame and even throws away money in his name?

Vegetable Level

India which is supposed to be the most cultured of all countries in the world has so few writers of real, creative talent. There are many reasons for this. Number one reason is: that we, as a nation, yet do not know what we want from life, leave alone the world of books or art; number two reason: we have yet not got over our conceit that we are the best people in the world and that our culture is the best (and instead of imitating the best of other countries we are content with tapping ourselves in mutual self-satisfaction) and when a people suffer from conceit, their work is correspondingly poor creativity. For creativity implies lack of prejudice or ill-will. Number three reason and, what I believe is the most important reason: that creative writers are not given recognition nor encouragement because they are submissive to none in power, believing as these writers do (and rightly so) that their power or strength can only be obtained through hard work in keeping within the laws of life or nature. And the scull-headed men in power cannot brook those in real power and clap on them and see to it that they are on the bread-and-water level.

The same can be said of the professors in colleges and universities who are on the tarkari or vegetable level, who know how much potato sells and how much good wheat is available where and at what rates. Thus we have in this hurly-burly of Vlctorian-industrialised-India such poor professors as are almost two a penny, and the numbers that get their Ph.D’s are on the increase, to the great embarrassment of the specialists and the Public Service Commission! How can one ever expect a high return of literacy and cultural development when values as values are fast crumbling and the tradition of the ancients of this country and in the world are no more recognised. How can there be tradition and the individual talent when the freedom of democracy is not justified by everyday-living–when people of talents have to beg for bread-and-butter–when corruption stalks the country and money which should have bought off the best for man is used to hoard, and thus money which should circulate is at a standstill–and prices shoot sky-high and the poor die like flies and the country is visited by a man-made famine! This is neither culture nor tradition, but we see a mockery of both in our country where next to the Governor’s House or Parliament House there are hutments and on one side we see the rich in all their glory and adjacent to them the very poor!

Paradox

Judged by the number of schools, colleges and universities that we have in this country, we are the highest-educated and even literate people among the undeveloped countries. Judged by the number of tall-talkers that we have in the country, including the lawyers, one would imagine that we are the most reasonable and even justice-minded people, but the question is: Are we? We quibble over sections and make mountains of mole-hills and instead of the law being used for the service of man we maim man in the name of law! It is a paradox that we who love living creatures, including animals, kill off men. Or would the burning of the policeman on duty over the language-issue be a fact in this age of culture and humanism? We talk big–of sacrifice, of service, of internationalism–but when it comes to understanding our neighbours who are slightly different from us in colour or creed we want all to agree to our way of living! The fanatics that we are, the brain-wave exponents that we are inclined to be, we want all and sundry to agree with us in every particular and the tolerance that the religion and culture of this country is noted for is put to shame and we become no better than the Whites who look down on the Blacks.

Really cultured people treat humans as humans, that is with love and sympathy and are not one with partial to anyone people believing, as they do, that there are good and bad in all section of people; and this is no more than stating that there are villains in court-circles as there are in rustic-areas; and therefore to talk of one-land and one-culture is as absurd as Wilkie’s One-World Policy! Man cannot be the same and not even education and home-upbringing can ensure this sameness; nor does education promote monotony; and democracy is successful only when many voices are heard and the people have open minds to agree to differ! Ideologically we may be different but this should not deter us from enjoying the comforts and amenities that a civilised people are entitled to by virtue of their citizenship.

Whatever our differences with the people, society or the state under which we are, we should not lose the rights of earning a decent livelihood, obtaining a decent house in a decent locality and what is more important the right to be safeguarded from law-breakers. People, whether poor or rich, minority or majority, are not slow to see when there is discrimination and no one people (or section of people) should lord over the other for the repercussion is bad. See what the consequences are in Britain and particularly in the United States of America where slave-trade was the fashion and the Blacks were considered inferior. It will take a long, long time before it sinks into the minds and hearts of the White people that what they are doing against the Blacks is an evil–an unforgivable evil and which is so unbecoming of our age of enlightenment. There is yet much of the savage in us, despite our education and we see traces of this savagery in the cruelty that we perpetrate on people we do not like and more particularly in wars which concern one nation and another. One wonders when we will speak the language of enlightenment and understanding when theme is so much good to be done to people the world over!

Dream-child

Creative writing, be it in the English or in any of the Indian languages, is something that cannot be written to a plan or for a programme. For creative writing by its very nature is free and the writer does what he wants. (within bounds, of course!). No creative writer ever tries to arouse the antagonism of any one people against another–and when he does it is often unconscious (as in shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice where Shylock is made to look and feel a beast and in another play Twelfth Night where Malvolio is baited for the Puritan that he is). Maupassant could see more qualities of good in a street-woman than in an ordinary wife and this is not to say that a street-woman was better than a woman who happened to be a wife. In fact, as sociologists have pointed out in their survey of street-women, most street-women are accommodating because they see men in such pitiable plights! There is a story (and Maupassant-readers will remember it) of the woman who would cry in a cemetery during a funeral, and it was one of her ruses to get at the pity of man and to be with him and earn!

Creative writers in India have enough material for humour as much as weird stories, not to mention detectives and romantic stories–but the pity of it all is that society is daily in a violent state of change, in spite of the obsession of the people as a whole towards convention or tradition. And those who have travelled overseas bring with them the uninhibited behaviour-pattern, which they like so much, and often live in a colony all their own, or jostle with people of die-hard disposition. The fact that man rules the roost in India makes him a lively character and the fact, again, that women are submissive to men yet makes it difficult for women-characters in short stories, novels or dramas, to behave with a free rein, as they would do in overseas countries. Yet there is enough explosive-material in the relationship between Man-and-Woman and more, if they are of different grades (socially or intellectually).

The palmy days of Tagore and Premchand and Saratchandra are over and much as we like their stories, and even their age, we cannot put the clock back and we have therefore to move forward even if it means a break in our convention or tradition. The educated beings that we are we need to realise our oneness with man the world over and to see in men and women the same basic characteristics, depending on their upbringing and professions. A creative writer gives birth to a dream-child every time he writes and we are people whom the creative writer uses in any way he likes, depending on his purpose. The sensitive beings that creative writers are, they do not forget the people, places and things they see. Most people would call creative writers abnormal and they are not wrong, for creative writers are by no means the normal beings that we take them for. They may eat with us and move with us and even talk our language but when they are with themselves they are different and even unique and hate anything like the herd-instinct that motivates other humans to club together. They are a paradox to themselves and to those who know them. One moment they are as simple as can be and the very next they can be as wily as wolves!

The mystery that creative writers are to themselves and the world, they unfold their mystery to those whom they call the reading-public. They give out their best and uncover the lid of the unconscious where all the filth of the ages lurks within and lo! they are filthy no more but as clean as clean can be! Creative writers are unafraid of public opinion–and why should they be when they are daily discovering themselves and the greatness within themselves? Milton brought out his best in his magnum opus as Goethe brought out his best in Faust and creative writers reach people on all levels of intelligence.

Epic

Our age is ripe for the epic, and epics we can write if only we as creative writers realise our expansiveness of head and heart and soul. Of course, we may not be a very poetic people, seeing that poetry is not that good as prose is but we cannot gainsay the uses of poetry. Our poetry will naturally be of a different brand from what we were accustomed to. It will be in the line of The Waste Land, for we cannot help seeing our age as topsy-turvy, the age of Kaliyug. We feel the forces of good and evil at war and much as we praise the age of sputniks and the might of man as shown in science and psychology, we cannot help sighing as Wordsworth did, crying out to “the organ-voiced” poet to save us:

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters….

……We are selfish men;

Oh! raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

We see in a trice that we have gone off the track–that we are lost men, hollow men, rats in fact, and we see the Babylon that we have created for ourselves. We find ourselves on the brink of death and vultures nearing us–and then the glory and the end is in sight. We see ourselves as epic writers, writing with might land main, calling on the God of Light and understanding to help us, and we write and lo! there is a mighty scene, with characters and settings both of this world and the next–and our language perhaps of the nobility that expect demand.

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