Once upon a time, in a certain village, there lived
a mad man. Ones of his many idiosyncrasies was to ask everyone whom he met the
queer question, “Did you drink your mother’s milk?” It was, therefore, not surprising
that people were often not only nonplussed but exasperatingly intrigued.
However, one of them, eager to have an insight into the working of the mad
man’s mind, answered at once,–when thus addressed in the street on his way to
his work,–“Of course, I did!” Thereupon the mad man rejoined, “You are, indeed,
your mother’s son, and so you must always express yourself in the tongue your
mother taught you when fondling you on her knees.” The person who had made the
answer to the mad man’s question looked up and said, “You are after all not so
unhinged as the people in the village think. For, you have something
substantial, I find, in the upper story of your brain!”
The story may or may not be true. But whenever I
have met Sri Masti Venkatesa Iyengar–the leading luminary in the constellation
of Kannada litterateurs today–I have been reminded involuntarily and
irresistibly of the mad man in the story. For, so passionate is his advocacy of
the use of the mother-tongue as the only adequate medium of expression of a
person, that often he is misrepresented as an enemy of English, nay, even of
Englishmen, as one Indo-Anglian swathed in snobbery observed impertinently.
Therefore, it may be asserted, once for all, that he is a lover both of English
and of Englishmen; only his first and fundamental loyalty is to his own
mother-tongue and to the children of his Motherland. As he remarked with a
touch of hilarious humour–in which he is an adept–in the course of his
illuminating address on the “Faith of a Vernacularist,” at the First All India
Writers’ Conference, held at Jaipur, in 1945:
“English has walked into the tent of the
vernaculars of the country. I think English will do well to realize that the
tent belongs to the languages of the country and that she can therefore stay
only as a welcome friend. I say, even as a welcome brother. But it must not try
to become the master and drive out these languages from the tent.”
In other words, Sri Masti maintains that English
should have occupied, from the beginning of its introduction in India, the
humble position of a maid-servant or messenger and not the high pedestal of the
mother or the mother-in-law. This being so, he feels conscientiously, as well
as cogently, that no Indian can be quite at home in this language of our
erstwhile rulers. Even the best of Indian writers in English can only expect,
to use his picturesque phrase, “to be in the street!” As he said to an honoured
ambassador of culture the other day, his eyes lit up with the genial banter of
a Birbal, “The English people, when they came to our country over a century and
a half ago, brought with them, among other things, also their own language.
There was nothing wrong in this. But where they blundered was that, instead of
confining the use of English to their own fellow-countrymen here, they
compelled everyone of us, too, to learn the language and, what is still worse,
employ it in communicating with one another in the family. Instead of wearing
their leather-shoes to keep the feet clean, they wished to have the whole place
carpeted with leather! Think of the cost and the cussedness of, it all!”
But let not the reader run away with the erroneous
impression that Sri Masti has spent his life in only protesting, like a blind
crusader, against the employing of English in expressing ourselves on every
occasion–ordering a cup of coffee in an Indian restaurant in English, caressing
a young child in English, getting angry with another in English, comforting an
aggrieved person in English, abusing the adversary in an argument in English,
and so on. No, far from it. He is the forerunner of the modern cultural
renaissance in Kannada.
The source and stimulus of this revival have been,
for Sri Masti, the ancient epics of India–the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, in
particular, and the standard classical works in Sanskrit–that hoary mother of
languages, but a mother whose heart is ever young with the romance and radiance
of truth. Masti’s Poetry of Valmiki, which is in English, is something
of a letter of introduction to the myriad-sided mind of that monarch among
poets. His studies in the Mahabharata are a mosaic in the diversified divinity
of humanity. His Popular Culture of Karnatak is a tribute to the
cultured nature of the tillers of the soil and the stone-breakers by the roadside.
His biography-cum-appreciation of Rabindranath is a master-key to the
many-tenemented mansion of the genius of Gurudeva. His four volumes of Short
Stories reveal him as a renconteur of a royal court! His works in
Kannada–and these are essays and adventures in every branch of literature–are
more numerous. And it is these, which have made of Sri Masti a midwife of the
modern Kannada renaissance, for he has brought thereby to birth a host of poets
and playwrights, essayists and editors, and novelists. He is thus the patron
and permanent president of a miniature P. E. N. Club. And this is an
achievement par excellence, for anyone else in the service of Mysore
State–and Sri Masti served his “mummy” Mysore with unusual ability and
efficiency for many long years–would have found his creative genius crushed to
pulp under the dead-weight of office files.
It is a moot question whether his love for the
mother-tongue is derived from his deep devotion to the mother or his dedication
to the Motherland. Apropos of his abiding loyalty to the land of his
birth, it may be mentioned that Sri Masti believes that the true greatness of a
nation consists not in the number of its leaders, but in the greatness of every
individual inhabiting the land. He is, indeed, an aristocrat among democrats
and a democrat among aristocrats,–his aristocracy being a child of
self-culture, while his democracy is born of his undying faith in the
broadbased brotherhood of humanity.
In short, Sri Masti is an inmate of a hermitage in
ancient India reborn in modern India to hold before us the eternal verities and
values of the culture of our country which, as the Poet Iqbal sings in one of
his songs, still survives despite the diminution, if not destruction, of the
cultures of most of the other countries in the world.