Fathers and Sons–I

BY KUMARA GURU

(i)

Differences of opinion between a father and a grown-up son have always existed ever since the dawn of civilization. We read in the Ramayana how Lakshmana was wroth when he came to learn that Sri Rama, the eldest son, who was to have been crowned Prince Regent, was denied that position by the intrigue of Kaikeyi, their step-mother, The passage is very striking and every Hindu knows the story of how Lakshmana was prepared to fight the aged Dasaratha and re-instate Sri Rama on the throne. The irony lies in the fact that Dasaratha himself did not press Rama to resign his crown, but Kaikeyi asked for the fulfillment of her boons, which were at that juncture declared by her.

Lakshmana decried his father thus to Rama:

“Canst thou undoubtmg still restrain

Suspicions of those sinful twain?

Canst thou undoubting fail to know

Their hearts are set on duty’s show?

They with deceit have set their trains

And now the fruit reward their pains,”

and he later proclaimed indignantly:

“The empire is justly thine

This day the world my power shall see

That none in arms can rival me,

My strength the monarch shall abase

And set the Lord in the lordliest place.”

and yet, Rama said in spite of all the exhortations of Lakshmana:

“The orders of my sire,

My will shall never oppose;

I follow still whatever betide

The path which duty shows.”

The Epic thus teaches Hindu children that the father’s expressed, or unexpressed, wishes are mandates to be obeyed, which will, in the long run, render good to the son.

We read in school-books a Roman story of how at the eruption of the Vesuvius, bringing ruin on the city of Pompeii, the two sons carried their aged father and mother as the most precious jewels to be saved, leaving all their gold and jewellery behind. Yet we talk today with a sneer of the Patria potestas, or the supreme authority of the father in Roman households, not only over his wife and children but even over their children’s wives and children, in speaking of the history of Law. We speak, again, with pride of modern. civilization which aims today that the individual ought to be free from the trammels of parental authority with a view to self-realization.

Before I touch on the modern concepts in that relationship, I may quote a couple of verses, one from Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsa (Sanskrit) and the other from Valluvar’s Tirukkural (Tamil). There is a peculiarly Hindu custom throughout the length and breadth of India prevalent even today in this country, namely, of obeisance of youngsters to the elders on auspicious occasions, such as marriage, or the celebration of the birth of a child. And the elders, the father or the mother, the father-in-law or the mother-in-law and aged relatives bless the youngsters and wish them long life and happiness. A sincere respect for the aged, that their experience and wisdom might guide the lives of the young, was prevalent in Hindu society.

(i) Raghuvamsa (Canto V, Verse 34.)

“You have got all the blessings of life–

Any other benediction will be superfluous.

May you obtain a son befitting your excellence,

As your sire obtained a son in you.”

(Thus King Raghu was blessed by a suppliant brahmin, whose needs were satisfied).

(ii) Tirukkural (Part I, Chapter VII, Verses 68 & 70)

To find oneself eclipsed in intelligence

By one’s children is a delight to all the world.”

“What is the duty of the son to his father? It is to make the world ask, ‘For what austerities of the father, has the father been blessed with such a son?”

The reader can realize from the above extracts what the cultured Hindu world thought of the ideal relationship, which ought to exist between father and son in order that society may prosper. Aye, the child’s trustfulness in the father is enhanced by education, when it learns the Tamil alphabets, as by the saying, “Annaiyum pitavum munnari daivam” and the Sanskrit verse, “Matru devo bhava, Pitru devo bha va,” both meaning, “Parents are the first gods to be worshipped.”

(ii)

With this preamble, I propose to survey from a psychological stand-point a few masterpieces of European Literature, which treat of the relationship between father and son. The first book that suggests itself is Gorge Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel. My first attempt to read it at the age of seventeen during my college days proved abortive. The entire matter was too hard for me to understand and I could not get beyond the chapter “Ferdinand and Miranda”. The vague recollection of ‘a System’ of education by the father Sir Austin, of his son Richard, induced me to take up the book again, early in the year 1908, when I had become a father, though of a daughter.

The principal impressions I received about English society of the year 1859 were that in their aristocracy fathers had a hand in arranging the marriage of their sons as in Hindu society, that mothers were as anxious to get their girls married somehow as in India, as is evidenced in the marriage to an elderly gentleman, of young Clare, brought about by the mother. The so-called romantic attachment of, or the choice by, a young man and a young woman, could not be so common as was frequently alleged to be the custom in society, according to the impressions created in the minds of Hindu readers by the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It surprised me that Meredith had nothing to say of the feeling of repentance, if any, of Sir Austin Feverel, which should have been aroused in him by the tragedy in Richard’s life caused by the latter’s temporary unfaithfulness to his not highly intellectual wife Lucy, and by her later death. The occasional reference in the novel to the ‘sowing of wild oats’ before marriage led me to believe that the institution and sanctity of the family tie was beginning to break up in aristocratic English households.

The few biographies of Meredith written in 1909 and subsequently, long after his death, reveal that certain autobiographical features are present in the novel. George Meredith was an only son and his childhood was not quite happy. He lost his mother at the age of five, and his father re-married when he was about thirteen years old. He was sent to Germany for his studies at the age of fourteen. Meredith lacked the influence of a mother at adolescence. So did his son. Meredith’s first wife deserted him in the year 1858. Later, as if under a law of a nemesis, Meredith’s son by that lady was alienated from him. These unhappy reminiscent features have affected the depiction of the story, which is an art-presentation of life as he found it.

The novel begins, as in Meredith’s life, with the desertion of Sir Austin by his wife, who ran away with a poet instead of a painter. Sir Austin’s relations with Lady Blandish, who seems eternally waiting for Sir Austin’s asking for her hand, are only those of a lady friend, but not as man and wife. The whole show of silence about love in the household is given away when Richard sees his father kiss Lady Blandish’s hand. My conviction is that the tragedy of Richard’s life is in a sense due to his not having known the love of a mother, who could have acted as an intermediary between father and son in their mutual confidences. The system of Sir Austin that he should not have allowed any chance for his son Richard, to observe the ways of the world and of the love between man and woman, to have stopped even among servants any talk or display of passion and that the boy should have been brought up in entire ignorance of the human tie of man and wife, seems but an echo of the author’s distrust of woman in actual life, though in his novels he has created so many wonderful and fascinating heroines. Sir Austin himself, though he taught the tenets of Christian religion to Richard, failed to show a Christian forgiveness of his son, when the latter rushed into marriage with Lucy, simply because of his belief that the bride did not have a decent education and a pure blood, nor had he cared to find out the particulars of her upbringing and her genuine good nature even when casually mentioned to him by Lady Blandish.

One more observation about the hero, Richard Feverel. In Hindu society one may observe that a father-trained boy develops none of the graces of life, while a mother-trained boy is generally soft-hearted. So also, where the mother is a non-entity in the household, the father-trained girl lacks the graces of womanhood and grows imperious by example and habit. Richard’s sense of chivalry and loveliness of character were entirely due to his calf-love for Lady Blandish, and the latter’s love of the boy.

(iii)

Historians affirm that the healthy normal traditions of early Rome were maintained by the discipline of the family, resting on the supreme authority of the father, and by the powerful influence of the mother to whom the early training of the child was entrusted. All this was changed by the influence of Greek civilization. The Roman citizen was confronted with new doctrines in politics and religion and with Greek critical philosophy. Under these solvents, the fabric of tradition fell to pieces and there arose a revolt against Roman discipline and the tradition of self-effacement. The craving for individual distinction asserted itself with irresistible vehemence.

Similarly, thirty-five years ago, under the aegis of English education, Hindu lads were beginning to smart under and protest against the authority of their parents, both in the choice of the brides for their marriage and in the matter of their intellectual or other careers in life. Those were pre-Sarada Act days. The irrevocable betrothal of boys and girls at a very young age was quite common, though consummation was fairly later in life in Brahmin society. The avenue of jobs in all branches of Government service was a lure to the English-educated youth. The desire to live sumptuously and with grandeur was taking hold of the minds of the fathers too, of their generation, while the rising individualism of young men was a factor in social disruption. Society had, however, not advanced according to western standards for young men and women to meet in Hindu society for individual choice.

Parents, who were anxious to get their daughters married early, were not loath to take advantage of the rise of individualism of youth, especially when the young man had secured a decent billet. Parents were then in a conflicting frame of mind regarding the marriage of their sons and daughters. They understood perfectly well that a boy’s higher education would be hampered by the married life, and the quasi-religious feeling that a girl should be betrothed before puberty made the parents of girls press the parents of boys to accede to the marriage of their sons, while the parents of boys were unwilling to do so. It was to get over this conflict caused by the quasi-religious feeling that about the year 1910, the Hon’ble V. S. Sastri brought in a Bill in the Madras Legislative Council, of a permissive post-puberty marriage of a girl might have led to the pronouncement of the marriage as illegal, and to difficulties in the inheritance of property by their children under the joint family system. This legal measure, however, was not then passed by the Council.

The recollection of an incident in the family life of Brahman society, which happened even before my perusal of the Ordeel of Richard Feverel, and which stands in strange contrast with the father’s conduct in the novel has led me to this musing. A gentleman in Government service had a girl ward of about fourteen years. Her father was employed as a petty Accountant in a merchant’s business. The parents of the girl were poor, and the gentleman brought her up in his home as he had no child for several years in his married life. He learnt that a bright young man under twenty years of age had secured a gazetted job by a competitive examination. He had, however, no previous knowledge of the youth, who had just completed his education far away from the home of his father, a school-master. The youth’s father, a couple of years previously, expressed his wish that he would select a bride for the young man, but the latter would not let his father do so. The youth definitely told the parent to mind his business as he (the father) could not know what qualities or attainments he expected in his wife.

Can youths even today, I ask, realize in the matter of selection of their brides, the wisdom of the following words of a famous British psychologist?

“Physical beauty is much, but moral beauty is more, and health is the foundation of both……If the mother’s personality does not evoke your deference and admiration. beware... Remember that in choosing your wife you are choosing also your children; that their degree of intelligence, their dispositions, their temperaments and tempers will largely depend on what she brings to the common stock. And it is well to know that, in this respect, the qualities of her near relatives are as important, if not more so, than her own. If among them there are a number of feeble, disharmonic or cranky constitutions, it is highly probable that, although she may reveal no trace of such defects; she will transmit them to some of her children.”

These considerations, besides reason and sentiment, have usually weighed with the Brahmin parent in the selection of the bride for his son. The gentleman enticed the youth, as it were, to marry his ward after a week’s acquaintance, and wrote to the parent of the boy:

“Your son has agreed to marry Miss….. I shall be obliged if you will grace the occasion of their marriage.”

It was not the case of ‘Protestant versus Catholic’ as in Meredith’s story, on the basis of which Clare’s mother desired Richard’s marriage to be annulled; but the parties belonged to different sub-sects of the Brahmin community, though they honoured the same High Priest. Even among themselves, there was the pride of the blue blood, without any reference whatsoever either to health, intellectual attainment or character. It so happened that when the marriage had been fixed to be celebrated, the father of the girl came to know, only on the eve of the marriage, of the difference of the sub-sect, and he would not give away his daughter to the youth. This development caused a lot of distress not only to the father and to the son, but a strained relation between them. The young man, in spite of his billet, had not even the knowledge of the law of the land, for it was only the girl’s father, who could give her away in marriage when she had not attained the legal age of eighteen. The son decried to his father the prevailing social customs, which stood in the way of his happiness, and asked if he was an enemy of society. He threatened to embrace Brahmoism or Christianity as he could now live independently, saying he would wait until the lady came of age. No feeling was there in the son for all the sacrifices which the father had made for his education. The father sorely wept that it was not for his son’s conversion to Christianity that he had brought him up. For all the world he would not allow the ties of blood and religion to be broken off. In the interests of his son’s happiness and even incurring social odium, for the father of the bridegroom had always an upper hand in the matter of marriage, the father went down on his knees, and with tears in his eyes, interviewed a Judge of the High Court of Madras, a distant relative of the girl, to interfere on behalf of his son, and to bring round the girl’s father to the view that there was no illegality in the proposed alliance between different sub-sects of Brahmins. The marriage eventually took place some time later. What a contrast –this Hindu fathers self-effacing attitude towards the son’s happiness, as compared with that of Sir Austin, who exploiting the filial love, kept the son away from his wedded wife, let him loose in society and exposed him to temptation, which resulted in the son’s eventual unfaithfulness to the idyllic love and the marriage tie!

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