D. ANJANEYULU

Speaking to newspaper reporters in Madras some time ago on the problem of literary expression, Prof. Humayun Kabir made an interesting observation, which should make us think a little on the subject. He said, that a writer’s mother-tongue was not necessarily the tongue of his mother. It was rather that medium which he consciously chooses for his self-expression, for intellectual communication, for putting across his thoughts and feelings, his ideas and emotions, to the reading public. It often happens, and quite naturally too, that the same language serves both the purposes and it makes matters comparatively easy for the writer. But sometimes, it does not.

There have been well-known instances in which the writer chose for creative expression a language different from that of his mother-tongue, different from the medium of communication in everyday life. Many scholars of the past in India wrote their great works in Sanskrit and Persian, though they did not speak them at home. In the world outside we have in recent times the example of Joseph Conrad, who was a Pole by birth, and Vladimir Nabakov (the author of ‘Lolita’) a white Russian, and George Mikes, a Hungarian, who are all writers of merit in English. Arthur Koestler describes himself as a Hungarian-born, German-speaking, French-loving English writer. Instances of this kind can easily be multiplied. Nearer home, there is Kaka Kalelker, a Maharashtrian, who writes in Gujetati, and a friend of mine (by name Ramesh Chaudhary), whose mother-tongue is Telugu, but who is a writer in Hindi and English. There are a few established Tamil writers in Madras, who speak Telugu in their homes. Mr P. Lal (of the Writers’ Workshop, Calcutta) is a Punjabi, married to a Bengalee, but a poet in English. Similarly, there are many others in India, whose mother-tongue mayor may not be English, but who depend on English as their main or even only medium of intellectual communication.

Political Freedom and Creative Expression

The English language has been with us, in some form or other, for over a century-and-a-half. But curiously enough, it was only after the withdrawal of the British masters from the Indian political scene that a kind of normalcy was reached in our relations with their culture and literature. (I am not thinking here of the role of the English language in bringing to us the world classics on liberty and in preparing the field for the seeds of political consciousness, as that might be outside the scope of my present subject). I am thinking mainly of creative writing in English by Indians during the last three to four decades, and particularly after Freedom. In this context, it seems to me that once the stigma of political domination was removed and the stain of official coercion erased, the atmosphere has become more conducive to intellectual intercourse with England and Europe and, for that matter, with all other countries of the world. Now we can keep our window to the West (as well as to the East) open, without being swept off our feet.

It is a fact noted by observers of contemporary trends that there are more journals, periodicals and newspapers as well as books in English published in this country now than ever before. It may seem paradoxical, but it is true and significant that more creative writing and original work in English (notable for its high standard, as well as sheer volume) is in evidence, from a survey of published work, in recent years, than in the past, say 40 to 50 years ago. Writing on the subject in 1949, John Hampson, the English novelist who was on a visit to India, remarked: “Today we find the stories of English, French and American writers in the bookshops of Madras, and Bombay, and the stories of Indian and Chinese writers for sale on the bookstalls in Paris, London and New York. This exchange is a sign of the times, a token of better understanding between the East and the West, a prophecy of the widest cultural exchanges which will ultimately take place between the races of the world.”

In spite of this encouraging circumstance of a shrunken world, the Indian writer in English has not ceased to be treated in some quarters, at home and abroad, as a somewhat strange creature, an odd character, a curious phenomenon to be looked upon with mild surprise, or amused tolerance; and what he meets with is, more often than not, tardy patronage, unmixed contempt and even downright hostility. He is generally damned with faint praise and rewarded with left-handed compliments. The wonder seems to be not that he writes well or badly, but that he writes at all (in a language not his own). It is not unlike the spectacle of a woman preaching (in the eyes of Dr Johnson), a bear dancing, or a dog walking on its hind legs.

Native Image in Adopted Medium

But the writer himself has to overcome many serious handicaps, if he is to be true to his vocation. In choosing a language, to which he is not born, for his creative expression, he has to grapple with the two-fold problem of capturing a vision that is truly his own and, in the process, of subjecting himself to a discipline of grammar, syntax and idiom (and of metre, rhyme and rhythm) which are not his own, in his attempt to convey it adequately to his readers. He stands or fails according to whether he proves himself equal to the situation or not. The question is not why he functions in English, but how he presents the Indian image with English clay and tools. Added to this is the grim prospect of the Indian writer in English (be it of novel, short story or poetry) being weighed in the balance against his counterparts in the English-speaking world and found wanting, when judged by such world standards. A writer in the Indian languages is, in a like situation, compared only with other writers in his language region and perhaps let off rather leniently in the test. Even when he appears in translation and is not able to make an impact worth speaking about, he gets the benefit of doubt, and the blame rests possibly on the translator.

But with all these handicaps, we may possibly admit to ourselves in our outspoken and unsentimental moods that English is not now an entirely alien language to us. As Raja Rao observes in the foreword to his novel ‘Kanthapura’: “It is the language of our 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.”

Voice of Indian Renaissance

Among the earliest writers, in recent times, who tried to project an integrated national picture of India on the world screen, through an English projector, as it were, was the late Mr K. S. Venkataramani, an idealist and dreamer (As a writer and man, he was a gem of the purest ray serene). He did it consciously and deliberately as a mission as well as an art. The bulk of Tagore’s writing having been done originally in Bengali, he stands on a different footing, along with Bankim, Sarat, Premchand, Bharati, Gurazada and other giants of Indian literature. Tagore cannot, strictly speaking, be classed as an Indian writer in English though he has done some original writing in that language. It is, however, well to remember in this connection that in awarding the Nobel Prize, the judges had to depend solely on the English version of his ‘Gitanjali’ and had no possible approach to the original which only goes to prove that the English ‘Gitanjali’ was considered a work of distinction in its own right, though it might not approach the Bengali original in its word music or shades of meaning, nuances of expression, or its suggestive power and wealth of association.

Venkataramani was truly a child of the Indian renaissance, in a very special sense. The picture of resurgent India, as it obtains in ‘Kandan the Patriot’ or ‘Murugan the Tiller’ might now tend to fade, as it was essentially that of India in political ferment in the early thirties under the impact of the Gandhian movement in the struggle for freedom. Some of his works of longer fiction may have dated now, as they were really in the nature of period pieces. But there is one little book, which is a neat collection of vignettes of Indian life, of South Indian life in particular, ‘Paper Boats’, which belongs to a different category. The fragile fleet he floated more than forty years ago can still be watched on the uncharted seas from our shores. In the author’s own words, “it carries in its bosom the peace and contentment, the innocence and the joy of an ancient culture and a way of life that draws its sustenance, like a snow-fed river, from the invisible peaks of an unchanging Dharma.” One need not even agree with his insistence on this Dharma, to enjoy the nostalgic glimpses of the undying picture of India in the shape of the colourful mendicant, the performing bull, the timeless, ageless, grandmother, and the eternal Hindu temple.

Accent on Realism

Nearest, in some respects, to Venkataramani, in his grasp of the Indian image, is Manjeri S. Isvaran, whose forte is the short story. With this difference, however, that while Venkataramani tends to be rather sentimental and romantic in his outlook and can hardly ever turn his eyes away from the sylvan background of his wind-swept and water-laved village (of Kaveripoompattinam in Tanjore district), Isvaran is an impertinent realist (a realist with a vengeance, as it were), who can feel at home in the ample, cosy, spacious atmosphere of a family mansion in the city of Madras or in a dingy hovel near the market place in a Malabar village, on the green and shaded highways of Mylapore, or the narrow, crowded bylanes of Triplicane, which are by no means sanitary. Personally, I feel there is something typically Indian in his short stories–in their ethos as well as their characterisation whether it be the moving and powerful ‘Immersion’ (a long and elaborately done story, full of feeling and instinct with a sense of foreboding), or ‘Decision’, both of which are sketched on a fairly large canvas, or ‘Saturday is Saturday’ (where the theme is fragile, but the flavour is so homely–that of a newly-wed girl expecting and meeting her young husband, on his first visit to the father-in-law’s house) and ‘the Lustral Bath’, where we smile with the author, who seems to peep, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, from the keyhole of the door at the amusing situation in the Puja room of an orthodox Hindu household.

In the Malgudi of his novels (we do not know whether it is a combination of Mysore and Lalgudi), R. K. Narayan ostensibly depicts his quiet little town on the banks of the Sarayu. But, we could perhaps take it as a symbol of contemporary India. The small mofussil town, with its high school, cricket ground, temple and market place, soon changes with the times; it acquires a film studio, a road bridge on the river, a college and other insignia of modern civilisation, like the rest of India. The school boy Swami and his friends, Bachelor of Arts Krishna, who becomes an English teacher, Sampath the go-getter, Margayya the money lender (or the financial expert, as he is called), Raju the railway porter–petty shopkeeper–turned impressario transformed into a saint–are all living characters from the changing and complex milieu that is our India. The fact that Narayan has no axe to grind in his novels or short stories makes him more acceptable to us in India (as also to English readers outside), as a man of letters, pure and simple, unlike some other novelists, whose vitality and technical ability is undoubted, but whose political or ideological slant is obvious. For the same reason, his depiction of Indian life is likely to be more balanced and comprehensive than that of those writers who are committed, more than somewhat.

The Art of Raja Rao

Among the Indian writers of fiction in English practising now, Raja Rao stands in a class by himself, though he is in some ways nearer to Narayan than to any of the others. ‘Kanthapura’, written in 1938, is a novel spun around an Indian village rocked by the Gandhian revolution in the early thirties. As Dr K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar points out in his recent book on Indian writing in English, Raja Rao’s style is very unconventional, because of his attempt to adopt in English the idiom, the rhythm, the tone, the total distinctiveness of vernacular speech (Kannada in this context). A glance at some of the nicknames will be of interest: Waterfall Venkamma, Nose-scratching Nanjamma, Front-house Akkamma, Temple Rangappa, Gold-bangle Somanna etc. But, we cannot accuse Raja Rao of lapsing into Babu English at any place. He does the difficult trick of achieving a kind of Indian idiom in English, with its distinct echo of regional speech and reflection of local colour, without slipping into unintentional Indianisms. Dr Mulk Raj Anand attempts this kind of thing too and succeeds with a more popular appeal, perhaps, but the result is not so satisfying to my mind, at any rate.

Raja Rao’s latest work ‘The Serpent and the Rope’ is perhaps the most significant–not necessarily the most popular–novel (in English by an Indian) published in recent years.

On the surface, it seems to have little to do with any problem of national integration. But in its deeper implications it seeks to portray an integral picture of the Indian mind on two or more levels of consciousness.

The story of the novel is a fairly simple one. One might even say there is not much of a story in it, so called. A Brahmin youth from Mysore by name Ramaswami (Rama, for short) goes up to the Sorbonne for higher studies in the history of France where he specialises in the Albigensian heresy (of Cathars in the south of France). At the age of 21 he marries a French woman by name Madeleine, a lecturer in history, five years his senior in age. They live happily together for some years, in the course of which he returns to India twice–once for the obsequies of his father and a second time for the marriage of his stepsister. When he rejoins his wife, an ardent adherent to the Indian way of life herself, he finds her fast losing herself more and more in the quicksands of Yoga and Buddhist contemplation. Her asceticism soon reaches the stage of a denial of normal conjugal relations, when there is no alternative to a separation from each other. While Madeleine finds it comparatively easy to proceed to a point of no return in reconciling her native tenets of Roman Catholicism with the new-found principles of Buddhism, Rama seems, for a time, to hang in the thin air, faced with the difficulty of finding a personal solution to a spiritual problem. The main thing to note about him is that he is an Indian, a Hindu, a Brahmin, whether he be in Bangalore or Benares, the Latin quarter of Paris, or the villa in the south of France. He notes in his diary, “No, not a God, but a Guru is what I need. Oh Lord, My Guru, My Lord, I cried in the middle of this dreadful winter night. The winds of April had arisen, the trees of the Luxembourg were crying till you could hear them like the triple oceans of the Goddess at Cape Comorin. ‘Lord, Lord, My Guru, come to me, tell me, give me thy touch, vouchsafe, I cried, the vision of Truth, Lord, my Lord.”

Towards an Indian Form in English Fiction

The story is autobiographical, not only in form and method, but possibly largely in substance. The symbolism is uplifting, though confusing at times. The construction is loose, but the writing is often poetic, sometimes philosophical, but always sincere. The words ring true, though they might sound a trifle vague. We have a vision here of India, in all its metaphysical doubts and deep longings, its philosophical ideals and spiritual aspirations. One might even feel, with some justification, that this novel marks a step in the groping for, a stage in the evolution of, what might be called an Indian form (apart from the theme and content) in English fiction.

There are a few other writers of fiction who seek to present a fairly correct and vivid picture of India during the freedom struggle and after. Not only of a particular region of India as a whole, represented by a village or town or a group of them, as the case may be. In ‘Nectar in a Sieve’, Kamala Markandaya draws an eloquent portrait of the poverty of the Indian masses, especially of the ordinary middle class peasant in the village reduced to destitution by the ravages of industrialism and urbanisation. The new generation of Indians, caught between the urge for freedom and the inclinations of the heart, of duty to the country and responsibility for family and personal happiness, is described in ‘Some Inner Fury’. ‘A Silence of Desire’ deals with a middle class Hindu family divided between the love of modern science in one’s life and the loyalty to tradition.

Punjab and Delhi

Khushwant Singh is a writer who specialises in the life of the people of the Punjab during and after Freedom, with special reference to the Sikhs. But he is not exactly a regional writer, not because he writes in English, but because he combines the maximum of local colour with at least a fair minimum of universal appeal. By a skilful use of slang in the presentation of dialogue and a few deft touches in description he gives the reader a compelling picture of the Punjab and India. Man Majra is to him what Malgudi is to Narayan. Anand Lall (which is the pen name of Arthur S. Lal) also writes of the Punjab and Delhi in his ‘Seasons of Jupiter’ and ‘The House at Adampur’. The new rich in Delhi in the post-freedom era (and the way they react to the influences of the West) is the main subject of the novels of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, like ‘To whom she will’, ‘The Nature of Passion’ and ‘Esmond in India’. She uses gentle satire as an effective weapon, but she always manages to maintain a sense of proportion. In her own life she represents a kind of national integration, for she is a Pole by birth, who had learnt English as a foreign language. She is married to an Indian and has identified herself with India in more senses than one. Her outlook on life is, therefore, that of an Indian, looking at other Indians with sympathy, tolerance and amusement and not that of an outsider looking down upon or making fun of the people of this country without sympathy or understanding.

Contemporary Scene

Three other recent novels give us a fairly comprehensive picture of contemporary India. ‘Distant Drum’ by Manohar Mulgonkar is the story of the officers and men of the Indian Army (as represented by the battalion known as the 4th Satpuras) from the time of the second world war and the manner in which they are able to adjust themselves to the needs of social life in the India after freedom. The frenzy of communal riots, as seen in Delhi, on the eve of freedom, the role of Hindu and Muslim officers who join hands like brothers in quelling the riots, the Kashmir problem and the sense of fraternity between the two officers (who now happened to be ranged against each other on opposite sides of the cease-fire line) are all so vividly brought out here. It can be said to be a kind of measured tribute to the role of the Indian Army in national integration.

‘Chronicles of Kedaram’ by K. Nagarajan is a story set in a small mofussil town in South India against the background of the changing political scene between the two world Wars. It centres round the life of the narrow circle of lawyers in that town–their loves and friendships, jealousies and intrigues. But all the important events in Indian politics like the non-cooperation campaign, the general elections and office acceptance by the Congress in different provinces, are adequately reflected on the life of this lawyer community in this town. Padmini Sen Gupta’s ‘Red Hibiscus’ brings out the survival age-old values in the Hindu family life in Bengal under the pressures of modern civilisation.

Manoj Basu’s ‘The Forest Goddess’ (a translation from the Bengali) vividly describes the life of the poor, hardy folk who live close to nature in all its terror and charm in the Sunderbans. Prof. Humayun Kabir’s ‘Men and Rivers’ depicts the joys and sorrows, the struggles and yearnings of the common people whose fortunes are interlinked with those of the rivers in East Bengal which are beneficient and furious by turns.

Scholarship and Wit

Two or three writers of prose other than fiction come upper-most to my mind in discussing recent Indian writing in English. One is Nirad C. Chaudhri who gives a scholarly and perceptive, though at times non-conformist, account of changing India in his ‘Autobiography of an unknown Indian’. A similar, though less scholarly but equally readable, story is told in ‘The Punjabi Century’ by Tandon. ‘Sotto Voce’ by Vighneswara (which is the pen name of N. Raghunathan, who deserves to be better known) is an engaging collection of wise and witty comments on contemporary life by one who is steeped in the classics of English, Tamil and Sanskrit and who is deeply rooted in the Indian tradition.

In this rather perfunctory survey, I have touched only one branch of writing and only a few writers at that, with whom I am familiar. Poetry I did not choose to discuss, as I am not sure what to make of some of its new experiments. In a discussion on Indian writing in English one or two points seem to emerge. One is that Indian writing in English (whether it be good, bad or indifferent) has come to stay as, for instance, the writing in other Indian languages. The second is that it has a vital role to play in national integration, as it is still the only kind of writing which all of us can understand and enjoy in an equal measure. Mr. Lal says that the Hindi writer writes for the Hindi readers and the punjabi writer writes for the Punjabi readers, whereas the English (or Indo-Anglian) writer writes for the Indian reader, directly at any rate, as also to the world reader. Perhaps all writers write for all readers, but there is the process of translation involved in the case of writers in the regional languages before they could reach the readers in other regions. The role of the Indian writer in English is, therefore, at least as great as that of the writer in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil or Telugu or any other Indian language, for that matter.

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