BY K. SAMPATHGIRI RAO, M.A.
I went through Prof. Thiagarajan’s critique of
Kailasam’s English Plays1 with great interest, being something of a
‘Kailasam fan,’ myself!
Every critic has a perfect right to make his own appraisal
of the merits or otherwise of a published work. I am anxious however that, as
far as possible, mistaken conclusions, however honestly arrived at out of
insufficient data, should be avoided. In this instance, Prof. Thiagarajan has
permitted himself to make sweeping charges, partly, I imagine, on account of
lack of adequate appreciation of Kailasam’s ways of approach (as an artist),
and partly on account of ignoring the entire mass of his contributions in
Kannada–which is the more substantial, both in quality and quantity. Of his
Plays in English, only Karna is complete–the rest, Purpose, Fulfillment*,
and Burden are fragments. Unfortunately, he was not spared to enable
friends to complete these Mss. and other themes that he had from the epics and
the Puranas.
I am referring to remarks like “Kailasam is an
escapist,” “inverted moralist,” “lacks reverence for life,” “ seeks in
annihilation an escape from the burden of life,” “mistakes darkness for light.”
There seems to be an obsession to compare Kailasam to Byron about whom–after
the first flush of hero-worship–a whole tornado of literary criticism in the
latter part of the 19th century was let loose, and conceivably justly. But if
Byron had been (even remotely) a humorist, as Kailasam was, I, for one, would
have excused all his ‘inversions,’ ‘perversions’ etc. Kailasam was our greatest
humorist in modern times in Kannada, and created quite an army of characters
from all strata, delineating children, old-men, and women, the lowliest and the
lost in particular, with a kindliness and a sympathetic understanding which is
unforgettable. He reveled in life and its manifold manifestations. He laughed
with and at the world in loud and resounding guffaws. Such a one is by no means
Byronic, though the high-strung emotionalism of Kailasam is a lure to the
unwary to slide into the facile analogy.
His ‘Truth Naked,’ ‘Cain,’ and ‘The Simple Seven,’
by the way were just occasional ‘spasms’ (to use his expression)–doggerels
which he made up for his raconteuring purposes, and are too slender to be
considered the repositories of his philosophy of life.
The castigation that Kailasam has conceived of God
as an ‘absentee landlord’ is somewhat unkind. Surely, Prof. Thiagarajan knows
that Indian thought conceives of the Supreme Being in both His immanent and
transcendent aspects. I know there are other estimable gentlemen who fight shy
of Kailasam’s ‘Fulfillment’ but chapter XI of the Gita presents by no
means a more soothing picture of the Supreme One, and if Krishna did kill the
enemies of Pandavas prior to the Kurukshetra battle how did he do it? Kailasam
was not squeamish about facing the question, and provided his own answer
according to his own artistic sensibility.
It is obvious that Prof. Thiagarajan has not taken
kindly to Karna. It was developed out of a scenario for a film producer.
It later assumed a Sophoclean complexion, every Act ending with a pathetic
iteration about the Brahmin’s curse. One cannot look for Aristotelian unity
here. That Karna departs from the Mahabharata is true enough–as Ekalavya
does. But is it aesthetically satisfying? That is the main question. It is
difficult to subscribe to the dictum that Karna depicted in the Sabha Parva is
more satisfactory.
The metaphor about helping oneself to ready-made
stones from Tippu Sultan’s palace to build one’s private house–implying as it
does a charge of piracy and plagiarism–is inconsistent with the accusation
above made, that Kailasam has been so perverse as to reject ready-made stones.
If there is any writer in modern Karnataka who has been singularly free from
the tendency to piracy and plagiarism, surely it was Kailasam.
By ‘Raksha Yoga’ Kailasam meant ‘the Yoga or
Sadhana of offering protection to the weak.’ What Prof. Thiagarajan means by
the ‘friend beyond phenomena’ is obscure to me.
The tag about Byron–child of passion: the moment he
begins to reflect he is like a child–is wholly inapplicable to one whose
penetrating analysis of social life and even of philosophic ideas as in purpose
where Karma Yoga is sketched–gained for him the admiration of two such
intellectuals as Dr. S. Radhakrishnan and Dr. C. R. Reddy.
Altogether, Prof. Thiagarajan’s views betray a lack
of understanding of Kailasam, whom scores have seen and understood.