Prof. GADGIL AS STORY-WRITER

By Prof. S. S. HOSKOT, M. A.

When, as in our time, public events tend to invade and swamp private lives, the sensitive artist is beset with two opposite kinds of temptation. He is impelled either to devote his Imaginative powers, to the creation of a special world in which he can enjoy sentimental compensations for the frustrations engendered in him by an unsympathetic or hostile environment, or to regard himself as a kind of prophet, an ‘unacknowledged legislator of mankind’, whose function and destiny it is to remould the real world, by the incantation of his words, into another nearer to his heart’s desire. Should he succumb, he becomes a ‘romantic escapist’ or a political propagandist. In either case, he abandons his legitimate and unique role viz., to translate the materialistic, external world we all project round ourselves by the exercise of our will, back into the language of imagination and dream, to reveal, in other words, external actuality as symbolic inner consciousness.

To fulfill this function consistently is, however, certainly no easy task in the present circumstances. So distressing is experience, so hostile is contemporary life to the preservation of tranquil detachment and impersonal receptivity, so petrified, overwhelming and intractable appears our environment, that the artist must unusually robust and resourceful who would see it all steadily and whole, melt it with his imagination into its symbolic aspects and create its order. Besides being endowed with a comprehensive imagination and indomitable courage, he must be capable of devising techniques, subtle and flexible enough to focus the variegated material of modern existence into a significant pattern, to juxtapose past culture with present civilisation and fuse together disparate experiences of the poetical and the commonplace, the sordid and the sublime, the bestial and the spiritual. If his work to adequately interpret the modern mind he must also be able to utilise imagery drawn from science and technology and, above all, to convey extremely elusive and complex states of consciousness and acute sensibility. In the circumstances, it is not surprising that, despite the phenomenal increase of literary activity in the past few years, there has been comparatively little creative achievement of the first order.

To assert, therefore, that the hundred and odd stories that Prof. Gangadhar Gadgil has so far published constitute a body of work of more than ordinary significance is no mean tribute to this young writer. His talents are indeed versatile. A professor of Economics in the sydenham College of Commerce and Economics, Bombay, he has already published two works on the Principles of Economics and Monetary Theory. He has discoursed widely on public platforms on a variety of topics, literary, social and economic. He has written a travel-book and earned a name as one of the most vigorous controversialists in the world of Marathi journalism. But, notwithstanding this wide range of his activities and achievements. Prof. Gadgil is first and foremost a story-teller. The best of his talents has entered into his stories, and it is by them that he must be judged.

‘Manasa Chitre’ (pictures of the Mind)–the title of the first collection of Prof. Gadgil’s stories, may, if understood in its proper connotation, serve as a generic title to virtually all his stories; for, in effect they are all attempts to interpret the intricate and complex mental operations, conscious and subconscious, of ordinary men and women enmeshed in the toils of the contemporary environment. A strange, unappeasable curiosity seems to haunt the mind of this writer, like a restless demon, eternally urging it to probe into the innermost depths and recesses of men’s minds, to trace every variety of their activity back to its motives, and these motives again to subconscious impulses and complexes. These impulses and complexes themselves are often found to spring from the environment, so that men and women are revealed to be creatures of a world which their own voluntary and involuntary acts have contributed to create. They are self-deluded victims of an order which they themselves have brought into being without wholly realising what they were doing.

It is this profound penetration into the springs of human action and behaviour that gives Prof. Gadgil’s stories their distinctive character. What distinguishes him from the majority of literary aspirants is, above all, the fact that he is interested not so much in the significance of things and events as in the moments when men become aware of them. In his pages, the external world is made vivid by the description of the state of mind in which it is perceived.

It is not, therefore, presumptuous to claim for Prof. Gadgil what can be claimed for so few writers, viz., that the tendency of his work is to extend the material of literature and, at the same time, to clarify the processes whereby the outside world becomes the inner world within the individual. On the whole, the result of his writing is to direct the literary sensibility inwards. It is as though, in extending the material of literature, he had made the external world an object of interior sensibility, as though he had cast away the husk of its outwardness in attempting to digest it in his mind. In any case, the direction of Prof. Gadgil’s imaginative effort is in tune with the spirit of an age that has well-nigh abolished the distinction between matter and mind and whose tortured self-consciousness has invented psycho-analysis.

But, fortunately, Prof. Gadgil’s passion for X-raying the mind and unearthing its hidden secrets is rigorously controlled by his artistic instincts, so that the stories never assume the character of psycho-analytical documents or the pathologist’s records of ‘cases’. The impression they leave on the mind is rather that of a spell of orchestral music in which manifold subtle and evanescent notes contrast, shade off, and blend to evoke a complex and satisfying harmony. Prof. Gadgil attempts to produce on the reader’s mind a complicated pattern of artistic effects, fusing together inter-related and contrasted modes of emotional experience in a single story, as the musician fuses various notes to produce a complex melody. A typical Gadgil story is a symphony of variegated emotional tones.

Now, no writer with any knowledge of his craft would venture lightly to adopt such a complicated technique. It is admittedly new and its successful handling demands extraordinary sensitiveness and delicacy on the part of the artist. When it fails, it fails disastrously. If, despite this danger, Prof. Gadgil has adopted it, it is because nothing else could serve his purpose. The conventional pattern of fictional writing with its formal “exposition, complication, climax and resolution”, and all the paraphernalia of ornaments and background descriptions, was too crude and artificial to convey, with the requisite subtlety and precision, the form and pressure of his thought and emotional reactions to the world around him. For, when he looked around him, what he saw was the immense and chaotic panorama of a disintegrating and aimless society which, having lost the springs of its vitality, had become as incapable of creative experimentation and progress as a fossil. Religious sanctions had withered, and no other self-transcending ideals commanding spontaneous and widespread acceptance had taken their place. Cut off from the moorings of a living tradition by the advancing tides of science and technology that had invaded every department of his life, modern man found himself drifting without chart or compass, guided by no impulses other than those of self-interest, fear and greed. Dominated by the self-regarding restlessness, a victim of eternal suspicions, anxieties and day-dreams. His mind worked incoherently, and his life was no more than a matter of disjointed, hand-to-mouth existence. Though he was seldom left to himself, he suffered from a sense of isolation and loneliness and carved for understanding and sympathy. Constantly distracted by the innumerable claims made by the routine of civilised existence on his attention, he had little time (and less patience) for contemplation and self-discipline; so that he understood neither himself nor the society in which he lived. As a result, he was repeatedly confronted with situations he had not anticipated and provided for; he was constantly bewildered by the irrational urges arising from the unexplored depths of his own being and the unfeeling or hostile reactions of the world to his desperate endeavours to satisfy them. He struggled incessantly, but vainly, to establish some kind of harmony between his thoughts and his deeds, and between himself and his environment. In this struggle he deceived others and often deceived himself. The struggle was essentially tragic, but it had its comic side.

To portray this tragi-comic drama of contemporary civilised life in imaginative terms, to bring it home to his readers in all its range and complexity and with all its emotional nuances and overtones,–that was what Prof. Gadgil found he had to undertake. The undertaking, however, offered a difficult technical problem, for what in effect he had to do was to organise into a pattern (for that is the soul of art) modes of consciousness and experience whose distinguishing character was a 1ack of organising principle the absence of any inherent direction. He solved the problem in the only way it was possible to solve it, viz., by devising technique analogous to that of the musician. This technique gave him freedom from the tyranny of the cramping conventions of orthodox fiction and enabled him to bring together widely disparate thoughts and feelings to illuminate his meaning. He could introduce counter-point, repeat and complicate emotional effect and invest insignificant details with a startling significance. Above all, he could suggest the similarity that often lies underneath contrasting appearances and could stress the essential equivalent of seemingly different experiences. He could thus tacitly reveal the sameness as well as the contrasts between the past and the present, and between individuals living in different worlds at the same time, without intruding himself upon the reader.

The effectiveness of his technique has been demonstrated by Prof. Gadgil in story after story. The tale called ‘The Froth and the dregs’ is as good an example as any. The hero of this story is a typical middle-aged intellectual, one of the finest flowers as well as the ornament of our self-regarding and complacent ‘high’ society. Like many other members of this petrified class, he regards himself as a disinterested social worker; but, in truth, his multifarious social activities–which range from lecturing to women’s societies to writing letters to the ‘Times of India’–are actuated by no other motive than that of personal advancement and self-agrandisement. Though shrewd, well-intentioned and courageous, he has no real understanding of the revolutionary forces that agitate underneath the deceptively tranquil crust of our social existence. This is indeed not wholly his fault. This limitation of vision is an inherent characteristic of a class which, in isolating itself from the mass of the people, has condemned itself to a life of meaningless activity and glittering illusions.

The story opens with a brief cinematographic glimpse of Prof. Deshpande at his job. He had lectured for twenty-five years and now he is at it again. When a crow enters the lecture-room, Prof. Deshpande coolly removes his spectacles from his eyes and cuts a joke. There is an outburst of laughter from his juvenile audience, and Prof. Deshpande is flattered by the success of his jest. But while returning to the Common Room after concluding his lecture, he is struck by the humiliating doubt that perhaps the laughter of his students was derisive rather than appreciative. Dominated by the conviction of his own wisdom and the absolute rightness of his scale of values, Prof. Deshpande was not ordinarily given to doubts and inner conflicts. It was in fact only recently, particularly since 1942 that he was being frequently confronted with situations that baffled his acute intelligence and caused him serious anxiety. The techniques he had hitherto successfully employed for overcoming social tensions and conflicts, e.g., forming committees, framing cleverly-worded resolutions, and reconciling opponents with the soothing balm of honied words–these did not somehow work in the new situations. Reason and argument and persuasive eloquence were unsatisfactory instruments for dealing with problems that had their roots in the irrational urges of men. How could, for example, reason and argument help him when his wife regarded him as guilty and incessantly nagged him because his only daughter–an M.A.–had chosen to desert her duly wedded husband and had returned to live with her parents? Argument with his wife was as futile as argument with his servant who had latterly proved grossly negligent and insolent and seemed to meet all his remonstrances with a derisive smile.

The clear outlines in which the world had presented itself to Prof. Deshpande were now getting blurred. Ironically enough, at this very moment of anxious bewilderment, somebody accidentally knocks off his spectacles from his eyes, and the glasses are broken. Now, the physical world appears as confused to his vision as the moral order. Things suddenly seem to lose their distinctness and opacity and become hazy and translucent; he loses his sense of distance and cannot distinguish trams from buses and friends from strangers; and he begins to be harassed by the feeling that the atmosphere he breathed was filled with an infinite number of minute living germs. When a young colleague tries to persuade him that perhaps his purblind apprehension of the world at that moment was truer than that of the ordinary man’s, and that the impression of distinct identities that our senses convey to us may after all be illusory, Prof. Deshpande’s irritation knows no bounds. Such unorthodox notions were repugnant to the very fundamental axioms on which he had founded the formidable edifice of his entire life.

But a ruder shock awaited this magnificent structure close at hand. Soon after he gets his glasses refitted, Prof. Deshpande finds the hitherto crowded streets suddenly being deserted, and panic-stricken men and women running helter-skelter to the safety of their homes. Prof. Deshpande is mystified, but the enquiries he addresses to a couple of men in the street elicit no response. The men look at him wildly for a moment and hurry away. In the end, he comes across the poster that shatters once for all the insulated universe of his consciousness. For Mahatma Gandhi had been murdered and anew, fearful force had been released in the body social. There was none who could prophecy what havoc it might perpetrate in the first flush of its liberation. Prof. Deshpande feels that, like himself, Mother India had lost her spectacles and nothing in existence would henceforth be intelligible and familiar to him.

Overwhelmed by a feeling of utter helplessness, Prof. Deshpande returns home and tries to rest. He could think of no clever arguments or committees or resolutions to aid him at this supreme crisis of his life. He could, in fact, think of nothing. His mind was a blank.

But, curiously enough, another mind surprisingly similar to Prof. Deshpande’s, though operating on a different level of society, was stimulated by this very occasion to extraordinary activity. The leader of the Bombay Mawalis, whose talents and achievement had earned for him in the underworld a reputation as great as Prof. Deshpande’s in the beau monic, quickly realises that the shock which had temporarily weakened the normal sanctions of society provided him with an excellent opportunity to carry out his cherished designs against its security. He could not, he knew, successfully wage war against the whole social order. But, surely, he could now do what he liked with its most unpopular section and, for some time at least, do it with impunity. Which was this section? Why, the Brahmin, of course.

And so, heads were broken, shops looted and gutted, and for some time at least anarchy was triumphant.

In due course, the Dada breaks into Prof. Deshpande’s house with his gang. The froth and the dregs of society confront each other. By force of a habit which had become second nature with him, Prof. Deshpande is impelled to meet the situation with his weapon of sweet reasonableness. He tries to persuade the Dada that he was no Hindu-Mahasabhite and did not believe in mixing up religion and politics. When, in a moment, he realises what a colossal folly it was to argue with such an adversary in such terms, he stands in silence to face what was coming. He could think of no other response that was appropriate to the situation. He is hit and collapses to the ground. When, however, the gang proceed to attack his wife and rob her of her ornaments, it is his daughter who saves the situation by courageously confronting the marauders with a show of physical resistance, which they understood better than Prof. Deshpande’s reasoned eloquence. The gang is temporarily cowed by her fearlessness and, before they rally their forces for another attack, the police take charge of the situation. The curtain falls on Prof. Deshpande soothing his injured hip with his hands and groping for his spectacles. Whether he found them and, if so, whether they gave him a broader and a more realistic perspective of life, is anybody’s guess.

The story is an outstanding illustration of the extraordinary complexity and richness of effects that Prof. Gadgil is able to coalesce within the compass of a story running into hardly a dozen pages. The most conspicuous characteristic of his art is indeed its austere economy. Even the most trivial details mentioned with apparent casualness in the course of the story assume, as we proceed with it, an overwhelming symbolic significance. For example, the unreality of the glittering world in which the professor had dwelt all his life is symbolised by his pathetic dependence on his spectacles, and the breaking of the spectacles signifies the break-up of that world. Similarly, the subsidiary characters, besides living in their own right, also constitute a hall of mirrors revealing, each in a different way, the woeful inadequacy of the professor’s philosophy of life. The young colleague who tells him that there is nothing like “cause and effect” in the universe,–there are only “functional relationships”; the daughter who realises the essential vulgarity of the social parasite, whether his methods are technically lawful (like the professor) or openly violent; and the Dada who rules society in crisis as the professor has ruled it in security–all these represent vital elements in the modern consciousness, to whose existence he has been blind. Since, like the professor, allot us, by the very limitations of human nature, tend to create for ourselves an artificial world abstracted from reality, and to regard it as the real world, the professor’s tragedy assumes in our mind the character of an awful symbol of universal human.

The structure of the story is also characteristic of Prof. Gadgil. For what he does in this and a majority of his other stories is, to open with a vivid, dramatic presentation of a character playing his accustomed part in the narrow world of his routine existence, and then demonstrate his pathetic helplessness in the face of a situation which, though arising naturally from the conditions of contemporary existence, takes him by surprise. If the reader does not sympathise with the individual character, the struggles of that character, overtaken by the unexpected, would strike him as comic and even contemptible. If, on the other hand, he does sympathise, he might be disposed to accept the character as a tragic victim of an ill-organized society. He might even be moved to indignation by this revelation of society’s callousness towards the claims of the individual. But the author himself refuses to take sides, either on behalf of the individual or the society. He simply exposes, with the exquisite delicacy of a masterly technique, the subtle and manifold tissues of inter-relationship between the individual and the social order and the suffering which ensues from their maladjustment.

From the standpoint of the literary critic, however, the significance of Prof. Gadgil’s work lies in the technique adopted for this exposure rather than in the exposure itself. The technique is impressionistic rather than photographic, and depends for its effects on suggestion rather than on realistic description. It is by his deft manipulation of suggestive symbols that Prof. Gadgil illuminates the human significance of complex social processes, reveals identities and contrasts between apparently disconnected experiences and situations, and attains his highly evocative artistic effects.

That is to say, despite its appearance of aggressive realism and disillusionment, the core of Prof. Gadgil’s work is un-mistakably poetic. His ruthless and corrosive analysis of the social anomalies and contradictions of a decadent, disintegrating civilisation, and the pitifully inadequate and disjointed lives of the human types it breeds, implies the vision of an order of existence more in tune with the instinctive needs and urges of the human personality. Some of his stories indeed read like records exquisite day-dreams in which the author’s sensitive mind has occasionally sought relief from the harsh discords and contentions of everyday existence. But this strain of dreamy idealism that lent a tinge of sentimentality to some of Prof. Gadgil’s earlier work has been controlled–not eliminated–by the innate sanity of his temperament, the rigorous discipline in self-detachment to which he has subjected himself and, above all, by his sense of humour. The result is that his work, at its best, has acquired that unique, though elusive, flavour which, only a rare blend of poetry and humour can endow.

To his contemporaries it would seem that Prof. Gadgil’s most signal service has been to reveal the age to itself with insight and courage. He has seen the conditions of modern life with unwavering eyes and interpreted the intricate and often baffling relationships that determine its pattern. He has exposed the weaknesses in its structure and the disparities and injustices it generates. Above all he has shown how individuals, estimable in themselves but unable to respond to its rapidly changing demands, are condemned to humiliating frustrations and impotence. The effect of his work therefore is, like that of all great art, to enrich our understanding of ourselves and to enlarge our social sympathies.

But what of the future? None can predict with any degree of certainty in what direction an imaginative writer’s spiritual explorations will take him or what his ultimate destiny is likely to be. But one thing seems certain. Even if Prof. Gadgil were henceforward not to write a single line, his place in the galaxy of Indian writers is assured. Even when all the torments and moral conflicts that now afflict us have disappeared and the present pattern of society itself has given place to a better organized one, Prof. Gadgil will still be remembered as one who contributed not a little towards the renovation and enrichment of language by devising new forms of expression and extending the material of literature.

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