HUMAN REFERENCE

Some Words in Memory of L. N. Gupta *

MULK RAJ ANAND

Of the qualities which seem to have been the essence of L. N. Gupta’s person, it was already obvious, in his lifetime, that the human reference was the most pronounced–his love of people.

If one pauses to look at the balance sheet of his achievements one finds that he served in many capacities.

Civil servant of the highest credentials in the Hyderadad State, and later in Andhra Pradesh, he served in almost every department of administration: Civil Supplies, Finance, Education, Health, P. W. D., Housing, Municipal Administration, Taxes and Planning.

What is left?

I suppose the extra mural work which he did voluntarily, from his sense of civic responsibility. And in this capacity, he was member of the Senate and Syndicate of the Osmania and Andhra Universities, Chairman of the Board of Governors of Regional Engineering College, Warangal, and Chairman of the Andhra Pradesh Text-Book Publication Board for two years; he was Founder-President of Maulana Azad Institute of Oriental Studies. Hindi Prachar Sabha and of Sanghi College of Commerce, Muffeed Ull-Anam Girls’ High School, Dharmamanth Junior College and Hindi Pathashala; also he was actively associated with Anjuman-i-Taraqui-ai-Urdu Kamala Nehru Polytechnic, Nizam’s Orthopaedic Polytechnic, Nizam’s Orthopaedic Hospital, Bridge and Chess Associations and Badminton Federation, Rabindra Bharati and All-India Industrial Exhibition.

No one knows how he found time for his work in the world of imagination: as active associate of the Hyderabad Art Movement; for several years President of the Hyderabad Art Society; one of the Vice-Chairmen of the All-India Art and Fine Arts Society; member of the General Council of the Central Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, Honorary Secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Lalit Kala Akademi; inspiration behind the building of the Kala Bhawan Exhibition Hall of the various literary conferences.

I do not think that these involvements would have been possible, if he did not have the sense of devotion to others.

And where did this come from?

Some people say that it was inherited. But we have known many Guptas in our time. They have been distinguished in the field of Commerce and money-making, but not tended to be “devoted to works” in the Gita’s sense of those words.

I would be inclined to trace L. N. Gupta’s Bhakti to the definition, which this word acquired, in the period of national self-awareness, by some members of the bureaucratic intelligentsia, who could see the light emerging from the dark ages of foreign rule.

Where and when do such people arise in history?

The answer may be this: In the olden days, the archaic values were brought up by the hero as a tribe compeller. In the modern world, when the archaic values of solidarity of the tribe or religious group have yielded to the concept of democratic welfare state, the awakened individual begins to see a community of diverse faiths arising, in which mutual respect and sharing are becoming possible.

In this context, we have seen, though dimly, that the development of the individual has been an important trend since the impact of the West on our country. And this individual seems to grow, from participation in human relations of one kind or another, and not often from the retreat to a cave for self-realisation, as in the Vedic and mediaeval period. In fact, the involvement in the very processes of development of the group seems to bring about, in the human being, the grooves of passion, knowledge and willed action.

At the beginning of our century, our people at the highest level of self-consciousness, were involved in the struggle to unite our sub-continent into a nation. There is no precise concept which can define the miscellaneous urges of this half century except freedom. And this freedom cannot be formulated only in the terms of political action, with its many incidental struggles, between the archaic, tribal religions, and orthodox dogmas against the aspirations for enlightenment.

Those who held on to the importance of archaic and tribal values, at the same time as they acquired knowledge and the will for political power and possession of rights, soon descended to barbarism. These forces of reaction plunged our country, several times, into bloodshed. The driving forces of this reaction was mistrust of the enlightenment itself. Their privileges were bound up with orthodoxy of all kinds. They were rooted in the hierarchical society. They believed, and still believe, in institutionalised religions. And they were full of that fear of freedom itself.

If we look at the various world empires, we find that they were based on slavery, and the acceptance of slavery, by those who wish to conserve dead souls in the shell of an imposed order.

Our caste society affords the supreme example of a closed hierarchy.

Our sedentary agriculture, of the peasant resigned to the will of God, going season by season into the same furrows is another example. The closed order at the top believed that whosoever has the stave has the buffalo. This small order of touch-me-nots remained separated from the vast untouchables.

Within this compelled history, the pioneers of nationhood were seeking, in spite of their own hangovers, for a meaningful unity, persistently in our own time.

There is no doubt that the struggles in the towns had little effect on the village and small town population. But by the time of Lord Curzon and his assertive superciliousness, the bigger portions of the intelligentsia, at all levels, seem to have glimpsed, even though vaguely, a new inspiration arising. And, after the First World War, with the dialectic of Gandhiji’s various Satyagraha campaigns, the indwelling genius of peoples seems to shine in millions of open eyes.

Progress was not inevitable. There were conflicts with the believers in archaic values. At times the future seemed never to arrive. The quarrels of the two dominant religions made for disasters in every part of the country. And the poison spread from the festering sores of contempt.

But the total gain was that even the alien rulers recognised, more and more, that slavery could not be imposed forever–and they promised relaxation.

The exploitation of our land was, however, so well-organised, that the predatory state used all the army and police to crush the incipient urges. The prisons were always full.

All the same, the conflicting ideas, tendencies and situations, seem also to have gained widespread excess of fury by the time of the Quit India Movement, during the Second World War.

The battle of ideas possessed the people.

Already, the minds of thinking men and women were possessed by not only the primary need for political freedom, but also of the urgencies of the struggle for other freedoms. And, in this atmosphere, one could see that quite a few individuals who were part of the establishment, began to probe into the nightmare of confusion for insight.

One of these men was L. N. Gupta.

I remember him telling me that, throughout the years of the Second World War, he lived in a kind of schizophrenia oscillating between two worlds–the one dead and the other hoping to be born.

The agony of such individuals, who had gained admission into the new history, but who were part of the patriarchal society, must have been terrible. He told me he had taken to prayer for relief. And, wishing to renew himself from the compulsion of his consciousness, in and through service, he tried to convert himself to the future, through a continuous self-denial and dedication to works.

At last, however, when the warring states of the world, with their monstrous gods, the newest weapons, the aeroplanes, the bombs, the radio and the pseudo-modern ideas, like the Altantic Charter, had slaughtered enough of each other, there began a reversal of functions.

The slaves in the colonies demanded and secured the transfer of power from the various imperialisms.

The fertile civil struggles were even then sought to be continued.

The closed worlds of organised faiths still wished to live in mutual ignorance of each other, in separate orders, posing as new nation states, and conditioning their peoples to new slaveries, under the name of freedom, sowing anarchy and confusion and threatening to make the turning points into the dead-end streets. This obscurantism cost us half a million or more dead; but there were enough people who had felt which way the winds of circumstances were blowing. They refused to stagnate and die.

And, though the obsessive fears of the hierarchies still hold many people in the grip of the safe old order, though it was crashing before them, the pressure of wills of the peoples awakened to the possibility that each of us can be human and share the bounties of the earth.

In the transition to a free society, then, men like L. N. Gupta brought the talents that had been schooled in the days of deprivation. Like Mehdi Nawaz lung, Ali Yavar Jung and Hussain Zaheer, he interested himself in building the infrastructure of the many freedoms implicit in political freedom.

Stripped of the illusions and prejudices of the previous patriarchy, they seemed to have converged towards the departure points between humane feeling towards such actions as may realise the new life.

If L. N. Gupta had been inwardly busy thinking of how to serve people more effectively, he brought to his work in the Secretariat, his supple mind and an open heart–he would set aside a few hours everyday to meet applicants with their various plaints.

If he had harboured kindliness as a permanent trait in his character he went before office time, to the hospital in which he had interested himself.

If he felt that the changed times needed a new kind of education, then he went, after office, not straight home, but to the Hindi Prachar Sabha, or to the University, or to the school, where the renovation of young lives had been initiated by men of goodwill like himself.

And the perennial belief he had in the world of imagination found him, every week-end, organising a literary conference, a meeting of artists or an exhibition.

It was in the All-India Progressive Writers’ Conference of 1948, that 1 first met him.

As there was a little time during the Seminars of the Conference and there was no Mushaira planned, as part of the deliberations, he called the poets home to dinner.

I remember that lovely night, in which nature had ordered a near full moon to make the poets mad.

Some of the newest talents were heard then: Makhdoom Mahi-ud-din, Kaifi Azmi and Niaz Haider and others from among the new young.

The urgency in their voices was inspired by the compulsion to change everything overnight. The staid bureaucrat may have been frightened by the talk of revolution. Not L. N. Gupta. He leaned towards me and said: “The old romantic Urdu poetry is taking the forms of life!”

I told him that I had not been moved so much by any poem since that of Majaz’s Awara, until that evening when Makhdoam recited his poem with a sweet Laya.

Sajjad Zaheer, who was near us, commented that this was the first time in Urdu literature when poetry had become connected with heroic events.

Later, during the years, when I had occasion to promote the Triennial of World Contemporary Art. under great difficulties of financial aid in our poverty-stricken country, I found in L. N. Gupta a mature supporter, among the contending elements of the politics of art in New Delhi. He realised that the initiatives of the important contemporaries in India must be judged, not in the provincial manner of the British period, but on the universal level, as part of human effort to create, even in our tragic time, with all its handicaps, an art of the utmost truth. And we saw that, among the fifty-two nations which participated in the Triennial, the rhythms of India were marked by unique technical virtuosity and human inspiration, characteristically different from much Western abstractionism.

Difficult as it was for the generation brought up on English-style portrait art and the bazar tradition of the oleograph of the Pan-Biri shop and aristocratic collection of novelties, L. N. Gupta opened his eyes to the experiments of the new young. In talking about the work of one of his nieces, he used a phrase that showed me he had caught the essence of the pictorial situation in the contemporaries: “She wanders at will in the world’s studios and picks up what she wants.” Indeed, that phrase may be applied to many of the new painters and sculptors. If they have not achieved an Indian style, that is not to be deplored, because, at this stage of inter-relations between the countries of the world, the quest is important. In order to survive in our disordered time, it is necessary not only to look inwards in our traditional sense, but also to look outwards. Only the art which comes from living experience, in facing one’s confusions, beyond the old fixations, can have the quick which may give us new forms. L. N. Gupta had sensed that the freedom from dead symbols is another freedom to be realised within the political freedom.

Unlike many people who have accepted science from the West and yet certify miracles, L. N. Gupta had liberated himself from the mumbo-jumbo to an uncommon commonsense.

As he loved knowledge, he believed information was important, and he had probably made his own arrangements with the God called Wisdom. I never had the occasion to discuss matters of conscience with him. But I am inclined to believe that, keeping in view his human reference, he held the anthropologist’s view that the gods are made by man. And by the manner of his devotion to work, he seemed to believe in the “Gospel of dirty hands,” in soiling himself with perspiration and cleaning up the squalor left by our inherited doctrine of neglect, which we have been asking: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Gandhiji had taught us another kind of Karma.

He had written:

“I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, try the following expedient. Recall the face of the poorest and the most helpless man whom you may have seen and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he be able to gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to Swaraj or Self-rule for the hungry and also spiritually starved millions of our countrymen? Then you will find your doubts and your self melting away.”

From the way L. N. Gupta daily strained after good works, he seems to have rediscovered Gandhiji’s truth about self-renewal, taken himself out of the torpor of the Karma of self-worship, to the stirrings of those vibrations in his body-soul which made his person radiate the warmth of a truly human, only too human, person.

One of the undefined feelings I had whenever I met him or thought of him was the resonance of his person. The prospect of meeting him always filled with the anticipation of the talk that would be, the things we would plan, the hopes for the future. Somehow, by some inward intensification of his person, he had achieved an excess of affection, so that though he gave away much of it in the daily life, he had enough left over. Doubtless he had his moments of despair, but he had certainly built a philosophy of hope, on the basis that others are part of yourself.

And this gave him the capacity for friendship, not only as a mere sentiment, but expressed in the will to be ever ready to go out and be with others, and embrace them.

I was enabled to have this gift to me by him, not only during the times we met, but always even when we were absent from each other.

Many people in our country must have experienced the resonant voice in which this exuberant love came over from him.

In my own heart, I can feel this resonance as I speak of him. It is a refulgence he has left behind by an unwritten last will and testament.

Let us look in our hearts for it, find it, and distribute it, to everyone who may want this precious gift.

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