REVIEW
UNDERTONES
OF DISSENT 1
By
K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR
Virginia
Woolf once remarked: “Journalism embalmed in a book
is unreadable”. As a broad affirmation it is nothing to cavil at, though there
are the inevitable exceptions to this rule as there are to so many others.
After all, Cobbett and Hazlitt
were journalists; so were Stevenson and Beerbohm; so,
in our own day, were Lytton Strachey
and Mrs. Woolf herself. The modern age of urban
concentration and mass production is no doubt little congenial to the
cultivation of the art of the essay. There has been a steady dilution of
quality, a thinness of intellectual and emotional content, a blatant vulgarisation of taste. When one writes for an audience of
two hundred thousand or four or five million, one has necessarily to avoid all
nuances in thought and expression, and confine oneself to the familiar grooves,
the stereotyped responses, the stale similitudes. But
even in these degenerate days there are papers that
manage to retain some individuality and independence. There is the Spectator,
of
There
are journalists in India–Pothan Joseph, Chalapati Rau, Frank Moraes,
Iswara Dutt, Khasa
Subba Rau–who too can exploit topicality to superb
effect. Yet ‘Vighneswara’ (N. Raghunathan)
is in a class apart. For long regularly yoked to the heavy editorial wheels of
the Hindu, Mr. Raghunathan was no ‘free lance’
pugilist; but late in life he became one for a change and wrote the now famous,
‘Sotto Voce’ column, first in Swatantra and
later in Swarajya. If one change
was permissible, another became for him almost inevitable: the purveyor of serious political comment
in a daily paper of national vogue became the miscellaneous columnist of an
individualist weekly paper, and the columnist revealed himself as the perfect
humanist and the flawless literary craftsman. A life-time of training in the
exacting discipline of expression in a difficult foreign language now yielded
significant results. Week after week the essays appeared–with their tone of
quiet assurance and look of effortless ease–and, as the weeks gathered into
months and years, the ‘Sotto Voce’ feature became almost the sole
standard-bearer of traditional values and robust sanity in a world of rattle
and glare and noise. Vighneswara’s is often the
conservative, unpopular, ‘diehard’ view; his assent with tradition is apt to
take on the tone of dissent with current notions of propriety and progress; and
yet his views cannot be dismissed as of no consequence, for these undertones of
assent and dissent come with an accent of authority that compels attention. The
Elephant God of the Hindu Pantheon is both massive in bulk and slow in gait,
but he has an infallible skill in works, he has a steady and clear and whole
view of what he designs to see, and he has a sense of unruflled
commitment to the work on hand. He is at once the perfect guide to the world of
knowledge and the perfect dispeller of the obstacles to right knowledge. There
was a certain challenge in Mr. Raghunathan’s initial
assumption of ‘Vighneswara’ as his nom-de-plume, even
though it was made with an appropriate “votive coconut”. But we can now see
that the name has not been taken in vain.
Of
Bacon’s ‘Essays’ it has been said that they might be Minerva’s own lucubrations. Of the piece in Satta
Voce also it could be said that they might be the Elephant God’s own
sallies of the mind. Whatever the subject–economics, politics, education,
social life, language problems, literature, music, philosophy, commemoration,
obituary, even chillies and avakkai–the
transient is touched with the seal of universality, the trivial is seen to
be shorn of its triviality. The 150 essays collected in the present volume were
written a decade or more ago in the course of the three years of ‘the Coming of
Freedom’ (1946-48), but the effect they now produce on the reader is nearly
unique. It is a book that we are reading, not a collection of stray
articles, A ribbon, of stern purpose runs through and holds firmly together the
many items in this ‘social and political commentary’. Beneath the superfices of contemporary life and the blaze of opinion
and action there is the deep underground river–seldom seen but real all the
same–which is the true source of vegetation and life on earth. The culture of
the people,–the complex of swabhava, swadharma, swatantra, and swarajya that is the true index of this
culture,–has been the slow creation of the ages, and may not now be violently
tampered with except to our total discomfiture. Such is the core, the heart, of
the body of Vighneswara’s musings and animadversions
and gentle exhortations.
How,
it may be asked, about the tempo of change in this age of nuclear power and
space travel? Change is easy, and as dangerous as it is easy; but stagnation is
no less dangerous. The problem is to preserve the right balance between change
and stagnation–to retain the soul in its purity and power, yet permit the
body’s growth and development; and facilitate the education and resilience of
the mind in the context of advancing science and technology. The Church, the
Academy, the University–Religion, Philosophy, Education–have at different times
fulfilled the role of preserver of the values of culture without preventing
legitimate change and healthy growth. F. R. Leavis
says rightly that the University is
“...society
trying to preserve and develop a continuity of consciousness and a mature directing
sense of value–a sense of value informed by a traditional wisdom. The
Universities are recognised symbols of cultural
tradition–of cultural tradition still conceived as a directing force,
representing a wisdom older than modern civilisation and having an authority
that should check and control the blind drive onward of material and mechanical
development...”
Tradition
(the total contents of a cultural heritage) is preserved and kept alive through
study, appreciation and healthy criticism, and it is helped through contact
with other or ‘alien’ traditions and new ideas to refresh itself and march
towards the horizons of the future. But a hideous Bottom-like translation–a
sudden artificial transformation–cannot be a wise thing, or lead to good
results. The Church and the Academy have fallen into disfavour
in the modern age. The University has therefore the heavier responsibility.
There, if anywhere, we have to locate the springs of a healthy tradition; there
culture should hold its own, unafraid of the weights and measures of the
political and economic market place; there at least the ‘intellectual’ should
be able to call his soul his own, to follow his demon whithersoever it might
lead him, and to reject compromises even if dictated by authority. But our universities
have as a whole failed the country: they can neither fulfil
their essential role as the preserver of “a sense of value informed by a
traditional wisdom” nor even deliver the goods that a Planner’s God-State
stands in need of. Vighneswara cannot but spot out
this failure at the fount:
“A
university is by definition a fellowship of learned and inquiring minds. But in
Madras it has always meant the Vice-Chancellor, the Syndicate and the Senate in
that order of importance...it is the administrators who occupy the centre of the stage.”
Again,
on a later occasion (not included in the present volume):
“In
other countries the highest type of talent–the creator the explorer–are drawn
to the university as naturally as the iron filing to the magnet. They
are assured comfort and consideration and they are left free to follow their
daemon. They have not to pay court to pinchbeck dictators miscalled
Vice-Chancellors, nor have they to play the politician among pressure groups
who dispense patronage...”
But we are content to order things otherwise in our country. On the other hand, the University itself has necessarily to be reared on the broad foundations or a sound system of secondary education. While the ‘autonomy’ of the University has within limits saved it from too much political interference (except in so far as the Vice-Chancellor himself is a politician in disguise. as he only too often is), at the primary and the secondary stages the politician has been having things his own way. Of the redoubtable Mr. Avinashilingam.s allergies and their effect on education in Madras, Vighneswara writes:
“Every
Government claims to be inspired by a vision of the good life which it strives
to translate into reality. Our Education Minister has made it clear that his
ideal is not to be achieved through merit. How it is to be done we may guess.
For the country is being trained on a diet of “No’s”–No Sanskrit, no English
except of the piebald variety, no Science but what can be learnt through the
desiccated Tamil of the neo-purist, no culture that is not of the pure
Dravidian brand. So, ‘Hurrah for Illiteracy’! for that shall not fail us.”
One
of the post-Independence educational fads is the plea for the so-called “nationalisation of text-books” at the levels–primary,
secondary and collegiate. Bespectacled DPI’s and
seasoned University Registrars have overnight turned text-book publishers, and
monopoly and regimentation are the order of the day. But Vighneswara
clearly sees the dangers inherent in this ‘revolution’:
“The
great University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge are the nearest approximation
to official publishing in England. But the Syndics do not interfere with the
planning or actual production of authoritative text-books...
“The
fatal objection, however, has reference to the basic virtue that a text-book
must possess–objectivity. No Government, much less a party Government, is fit
to be entrusted with the task of determining what history, economics or
philosophy a boy shall learn or how he shall learn it...When the indoctrination
in a particular ideology–even if it be the innocuous rural ideology of the Wardha Basic Education Scheme–is set up as the test of
successful education, official text-books will effectively extinguish
independent thinking. You might as well gag a man who has nasal catarrh in the
hope of curing him.”
Since
the intellectual–the torch-bearer of culture–the custodian of tradition–the
creator of new values–is increasingly making himself scarce in the modern
Indian university, the responsibility of the unattached intellectual becomes
all the greater. It is a narrow thorny path, but, then, the macadamised
roads of getting-on and the seductive meadows of success are not for the
intellectual. He must be willing to go his own way regardless of the hazards on
the path. Hence the importance of people like Vighneswara
who are courageous enough to preserve their integrity and are ready enough to
praise the Past when it is worthy of praise and to condemn the ‘revolutionary’.
Present when such strong condemnation is really called for. The Prime Minister
might cry in derision, “Nineteenth Century!” when there is no other weapon in
his armoury. (Yet St. Marx was himself a nineteenth
century man.) But a purposive backward glance is not amiss, an intelligent
scrutiny of our gains from the past cannot harm us very much. Paying a tribute
to Ananda Coomaraswamy, Vighneswara says:
“Thanks
to him and others like him there is today a minority that cares passionately
for our great heritage and is eager to make it a live influence again. He
lamented, ‘A single generation of English education suffices to break the
threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being,
deprived of all roots–a sort of intellectual Pariah who does not belong
to the East or the West, the past or the future’. Remember that the man who
felt our cultural degradation so keenly was by blood only one half Indian.”
Coomaraswamy
was a host in himself, and so were the others–in their respective spheres–of
whom too Vigneswara writes with affection and
discriminating appreciation. There was the Hero as Scholar, Mahamahopadhyaya
Swaminatha Ayyar; there was
the ‘Tiger’ of Karnatic Music, Varadachariar;
there was Saint Tyagaraja the Nadopasaka
who wove “matchless patterns on the loom of music to body forth the beauty that
possessed him”; there was the incomparable Dhanam,
the Veena artiste; there was the boy spiritual
prodigy, B. R. Rajam Iyer;
there was Bharati ‘the CUCKOO of Tamil Land’; and there was, of course, the
Mahatma who suffered martyrdom on 30 January 1948. This last event provokes Vighneswara to write one of his most moving pieces of prose
art:
“When
Bharata asked, ‘Where is my father gone?’ Kaikeyi quietly replied, ‘He has gone the way of all
flesh–yea, he has, he the Raja and Mahatma, splendid in his virtues, great in
sacrifice, the refuge of the good and true.’ That magnificent epitaph,
proclaiming at once the vulnerability of the clod and the Promethean fire that
informs it, may be applied with equal appropriateness to Mohandas Gandhi. To
such as he Death comes, secret and shame-faced, like a thief in the night. One
instinctively thinks of that glorious figure on the lonely beach at Prabhasa absolving the piteous wretch Jara
with a word of cheer and a benediction.
“May
that divine forgiveness illumine India’s heart. Then indeed will Gandhiji’s
great faith, his noble audacity be vindicated. In trying to solve the problems
of society by the application of the technique of self-conquest he played for
high stakes. He knew what the forfeit was; and if he was as ruthless with
others as with himself it was because his eye was sternly fixed on the distant
goal and he was urged by an overmastering sense of impending doom. No wonder
that he often stumbled and the laggards fell by the wayside. But it is no small
thing to have had that faith and to have made others share it, however briefly
and fitfully.”
But
Vighneswara finds the right words of obituary comment
on other similar occasions also. The note on Jinnah is rather in sharp contrast
to that on the Mahatma. If Gandhiji was truly ‘the Grand Solitary’, Jinnah was
seemingly ‘the Man of Destiny’. Vighneswara’s deepest
emotions are not engaged here, and he writes in a decidedly critical vein,
though not without justification. But the summing-up is as pitiless as it is
masterly, and there is besides a telling finality about it:
“There
was the same absence of emotion about the systematic way in which he built up a
public personality for himself. His political associates cowered before him,
fascinated as is the tiger’s victim by the ruthless magnificence bearing down
upon it...Looking down upon most people, his lips curled in a perpetual sneer,
he yet gave the impression of suffering from an obscurely sensed inadequacy.
“He
lacked magnanimity. Mr. C. R. Reddy has spoken of him as the Coriolanus of Indian politics. But Coriolanus,
who poured out his contempt on the tribunes of the people, reserved his highest
admiration for a worthy foe like Aufidius; his
tortured love for his country was none the less love because it had curdled
into hate. When the Mahatma’s tragic death wrung from Mr. Jinnah an unwilling
tribute he must needs diminish it by remembering that Gandhiji was the leader
of the Hindus. Once during the war, when Britain was in no mood for parleying,
he protested in tearful querulousness that Gandhiji
wanted to embroil him with the British. And at the moment of his triumph, when
he sat enthroned on the Chair of State, the camera with pitiless candour showed him vaguely smiling and shuffling his feet
in a fever of unease. The Man of Destiny was, clearly, A Man Afraid.”
But
when the mood relaxes, Vighneswara is ready for warm
appreciation or love, on this side idolatry. Writing of Tyagaraja,
Vighneswara achieves a sudden survey of a segment of
Indian history and makes a neat point with overwhelming effect:
“When
the cultural history of India comes to be properly written, the migration of
small but dynamically active groups from one linguistic area to another will be
seen to have exercised a catalytic influence. The handful of Telugus long
settled in the Tamil country were one of the most important foci of that
continual excitement which hovered like a spirit on the troubled waters of the Carnatic in the eighteenth century. Cut up into numberless
principalities, beset by the invader, ravaged by the barbarian, the remains of
the moribund Chola empire yet maintained their
integrity and were in fact pulsating with a new life. The message of the Nama Siddhanta was
to renew and sustain the faith of a sore-stricken people. Bodhendra and Sridhara Venkatesa are the sun and the moon of that bright firmament
of which Tyagaraja is the pole star.
“It
was a time of unparalleled efflorescence. Poets like Ramabhadra
Dikshita and Yajnanarayana Dikshita who had revived the splendours
of the Augustan Age of Sanskrit Literature, jivanmuktas
like Sadasiva Brahmendra
and Upanishad Brahma Yogin, prabandhakaras
like Narayana Tirtha,
operatic composers like Melattore Venkatarama
Sastri, polymaths like Govinda Dikshita
and grammarians of music like his gifted son Venkatamakhi
blazoned the name of Tanjore in a trail of glory
which reminds one of the Age of the Imperil Guptas or
Athens in the days of Pericles. No wonder that when
the seed of the Taraka mantra fell on
such rich soil it should have borne such glorious fruit as the ‘Tyagopanishad’. It is the most heartening proof of the
vitality of our civilisation.”
But
one must resist the temptation to quote too often or at too great length,
although there is little else that one can do. How is one, after all, to sample
this ‘ocean’ of good sense and nectarean wisdom, or,
to vary the metaphor, this variegated landscape of views, avenues, gorges,
rainbow riches and passing clouds? To Vighneswara, Bharatavarsha is not that ridiculous concoction ‘India that
is Bharat’ or ‘Bharat that
is India’–and a truncated India and a fissured Bharat
at that–but verily the Mother, the mother of her forty crores
of children. Vighneswara’s words acquire a winged
quality as he projects this inspiring vision before us:
“It
is Vyasa in the Vishnu Purana
who utters it (the name) with the impassive simplicity and stately majesty
of the arsha: ‘That land which lies to
the north of the sea and the south of the Himalaya is
known as Bharata and its progeny as Bharathee’.
“The
disruptors and the appeasers, the dishonest historians, the philistines who
deny their parentage, all these get short shrift at the hands of
the sage who is the spirit of Bharatavarsha
incarnate...He proclaims the unique greatness of this Karma Bhumi, where to be born is the ambition of the
immortals themselves, for it is the gateway to Beatitude. It is the eternal
ground of Freedom.
“There
were three Bharatas famed in song and story. And well
may the land be proud of their name, for something of their virtue has passed
into her....Jada Bharata
for detachment, Bharata the son of Dasaratha for loyalty, Bharata
the son of Dushyanta for valour–it
is on this tripod that Bharatha Dharma securely
rests. And for every true son of Bharatha Bhumi she is at once mother and goddess.
There is a mystic presence behind her myriad shapes and forms. There is no vana but has its vana
devata. And not all the political chicanery of
partition and division can persuade me–and millions like me–that we must look
with an alien eye on any spot in this sacred land that has
since the dawn of creation owed allegiance to the supreme ideal of Nara-Narayana.”
On
the other hand, when the occasion calls for it, he can freely draw upon the resources
of irony, sarcasm or satire; and his writing can be pungent, it can be fiercely
edged, it can be almost deadly:
“...today
our hybrid legislators would give us Estate Duties without Beveridge.
We make the Worst of both worlds.”
“...in
a world that has lost its moorings, the Secular State is the Servile State.”
“Between
the Congress of 1948 and the Congress of 1887 there is nothing in common except
the name. Its claim to be regarded as the pattern of a non-communal secular
democracy is about as sustainable as that triple misnomer, the Holy Roman
Empire.”
“In
the post-Gandhian war for power the first casualty is
decency.”
“Mankind
everywhere from Moscow to Madras asks for bread, and its rulers give it ersatz.”
“Congress,
as Deputy Providence, is bent upon rewarding virtue here and now. The
‘political sufferers’ are not only to have their parcel of good land but also a
fistful of money to play with. Who suggests that this is to breed a new class
of parasites?..”
“And
as so many geese have become swans overnight; what with the exodus of the Britisher and the conviction, firmly fixed in
the minds of Congress bosses, that you have only to put a man in the big room
to make a big man of him, every first-division clerk hopes to be
Secretary-General in five years.”
“The
fallen Archangel was forever preoccupied with God. And the architects of our
secular State are incessantly thinking of religion.”
Brilliant
and devastating, these pellets of prose have the Potency of dynamite in the
relevant contexts. All is apparently calm; the sky is clear and deceptively
Serene; then there is a sudden pouring, followed by a streak of blinding
lightning and the sound of deafening thunder: and presently all is quiet and
reassuring again. So it is with the expanses of prose in the Sotto Voce collection.
From
the first causerie to the last, one realises how
correct Buffon was when he said that the style is the
man. Mr. Raghunathan was more than the grave
leader-writer of the Hindu. As Vighneswara he
is seen as the man of steady wisdom, the scholar steeped in Sanskrit, Tamil and
English, the reverent student of the sacred lore of India, and the bemused and
ironic observer of the Indian scene from the vantage ground of
his scholar’s sanctum. He writes with classic sobriety although the pen may be
dipped in sarcasm or satire; he is unperturbed even when the mighty or the
majority are against him, and he is imperturbable whatever the immediate
provocation. With a disdain worthy of Queen Victoria’s “We are not amused!”, he
often flings his verbal chastisements with never a semblance of agitation or
fret. The river of his style–broad and slow and
clear, with a deep rumbling organic richness of sound–flows
on and on, and we too are carried along with it. It is no use murmuring or
protesting: the massive scholarship, the rapier intelligence, and the momentum
of the dialectic make a formidable irresistible combination. The style is
indeed the man, and is the expression of a consistent and rounded philosophy of
life: one must respect it even if one cannot always agree with its conclusions.
It is a very personal style, too, for nobody else in India or abroad quite
writes–or can write–like
Mr. Raghunathan. Less razor-sharp than Rajaji’s, less nervously sensitive than Nehru’s at his
best, less candidly crystalline than Srinivasa Sastri’s,
less obviously high-sounding than Radhakrishnan’s,
less chattily informative than Pothan Joseph’s, less
brilliantly epigrammatical than Chalapati
Rau’s, less recondite or heavily impressive than Nirad
Chaudhuri’s, yet Mr. Raghunathan’s
style has a distinctiveness of its own, marked by a Sanskritic
richness in phrasing, a sweep of comprehension that takes all knowledge for its
province, an understone of dhwani
that insinuates many things actually unsaid, and, above all, a poise, a
cadence, a structural amplitude and adequacy that go with an almost absolute
mastery of the medium. Autobiography fuses with reminiscence, literary echoes
mingle with criticism, and candid comment nestles with jewelled
obiter dicta; the quotations are apt and telling, and are drawn from divers
sources; and the pen-portraits–be they full-sized or
in miniature–are electrically
charged with life. Mr. Raghunathan writes as one who
has a sense of belonging utterly to the great cultural tradition of our
country, and as one who is unafraid to participate in the splendorous adventure
of marching towards the future. He is often critical because he is so wise, and
also because he writes on things that really matter to him. Sotta
Voce is undoubtedly a gallant blow struck for Culture, and is in itself an
act of purposive commitment. It is a book to treasure, to dip into again and
again, and to have at one’s elbow always.
1 Sotto
Voce: A Social and Political Commentary. I. ‘The
Coming of Freedom’. By ‘Vighneswara’ (N. Raghunathan). (B. G. Paul & Co., Francis Joseph
Street, Madras–1. Rs.4.)