BY K. S.
“The Poetry of Valmiki” gave us glimpses of the
depth and fineness of Mr. Venkatesa Iyengar’s culture and the renderings of his
Kannada series which appeared in Triveni provided a measure of the
greatness of Mr. Iyengar as a creative artist. But the publication of these
thirty-two stories, in their bulk and variety, has given us an entirely new
vision of the ripe wisdom and massive creative power of this great man. There
are many Indian short-story writers who have produced one or two master-pieces
in this difficult modern art. But we believe there is no one in India to-day
who may be compared with Masti for the naturalness and ease with which he can
express in this form the best in himself and his people, the very contour and
climate of a complex culture.
Perhaps the chief difference between a
grandmother’s tale and a modern short story arises from the far greater
importance attached in the latter to realism of character and atmosphere. The
two possible extremes of the kind are well represented in this collection by The
Shah Abbas stories at one end and by Ugrappa’s New Year Day at the
other end. The two stories on the justice of the Muslim ruler are magnificently
self sustained narratives in which the stream-line effect depends entirely upon
the events and their co-ordination, and the speed and continuity of narration
are matched by the stern suppression of comment or moral. Ugrappa’s New Year
Day is a leaf from a villager’s diary, which has the incoherent excitement
and complex, haphazard, eddying confusion of actual history.
From the storied past of south India are derived
the heroic tales of self-sacrifice, The Queen of Nijagal and The Krishna
Idol of Penukonda, as also the even more heroic tale of The
Pandit’s Will and Testament, an illustration of the selfless
objectivity that comes from our wide, deep, impersonal traditional learning.
The three Rangappa stories–his Marriage, Deepavali and Courtship–are social comedies of rustic life, looked at through the twinkling, humorous eyes of a village elder, acquainted with modern education and himself romantically inclined.
My Teacher and The Curds Seller are sympathetic pictures of human relations
in Hindu families, where deep love and tolerance flow as a steady undercurrent
beneath the froth and foam of strife.
The Kalmadi Buffalo and The Judgment Here,
to be contrasted with A Letter of The Abbe Dubois, illustrate different
methods of approaching and studying “pagan” psychology.
Was it Indira? and Lakshamma of Melur are delicate studies in abnormal
psychology, the one passing and the other settled. In A Story of The Holi
Feast a village superstition receives an unexpected confirmation. Venkata
Rao’s Ghost and A Malnad Ghost treat of the supernatural from two
entirely different angles and make the flesh creep in spite of rational
explanations and recantations of belief.
Subedar in Danger and Jogy Anjappa’s Fowl are clever and
amusing police cases of very different degrees of criminality.
Krishnamurti’s Wile, Rangasami’s Folly, Venkatasami’s Love and
That Woman, all strike a modern note and they all skate, at some point
or other, on thin ice. But the lurking danger of unpleasant lapses is avoided
by consummate tact of narration and by a hard consistent realism. The placid
surface of the social waters closes irrevocably over the transient bubble of
sentiment. The stately banyan grows where Venkatasami and his romance lie
buried and That Woman is still that woman.
The Return of Sakuntala and The Last Day
of a Poet’s Life are exquisite literary reconstructions, perhaps
recreations, which testify to the author’s loving familiarity with Kalidasa and
Goethe.
An Old Story is a great achievement in its kind, and with Another Old Story, Sri
Ramanuja’s Wife and The Last Days of Sariputra, forms a class of
prose poems which we in India at once recognise to be true to life in every
detail, but which foreign critics would no doubt set down as far-fetched and
impossible.
Vying for first rank with An Old Story, more
complex but less firm in its structure is Masumatti (rendered by Rajaji
as ‘Venuganam’), an allegorical masterpiece on the power of music and on the
power of surviving form to recapture the departed spirit.
Other classifications are equally possible, but it
would be impossible by comment, extract, summary or sub-division to illustrate
the happy ease and many-sidedness of Masti’s genius. His approach and
treatment, his construction, characterisation and style, not only vary from
theme to theme but they fit each theme with the healthy, pleasant
appropriateness of a natural organic growth. Again and again, as one reads
these tales, remembering their initial similarity with those of other Indian
writers, one trembles with anxiety for the next step. One expects a false note,
a wrong turn of sentiment, an ersatz event; but every time one is
pleasantly disappointed and the pitfalls which have betrayed so many other
Indian short-story writers are avoided by Masti by the simple old device of
viewing our life as in itself it is really lived, without pride or shame and
without any advertence to the possible reactions of the “foreign critic “ or
the “modern reader”. Such artistic strength, such sublime confidence comes to
the man who knows and loves his people and accepts their ways of living and
thinking and feeling, without complaint or protest or irritable anxiety to
reform. In the result we have in all these stories, and pervading each from
beginning to end, a classical quality which is healthy natural and completely
satisfying. The richness and variety, the form, colour and texture, are not the
result of effort. They have come as the light freshness of leaves, as the
softness and fragrance of flowers, as the slow-maturing ripeness of good fruit;
and they represent a perfection attainable not by any sudden magic gift or the
hard mechanical labour of an hour, but the slow mellowing fulfillment of a
long, calm growth through many seasons of sun and rain. The comparison with
trees is indeed inevitable for work of this slow and satisfying quality. Our
only comment as we finish story after story, is that the miracle behind the
real mango tree yielding its natural fruit in the fullness of the years, is far
more wonderful than the trick of the conjurer, which forces a mango fruit in a
few minutes. Masti deals all the time with those delightful, eternal
commonplaces which having been, will ever be. His stories have the same rich
even texture, the same continuous natural magic, the same prevailing “negative
capability”, which content us in the best poems of Keats.
Masti’s characters live, and they live a normal
life. It is this combination of vitality and normality that makes each story in
its own historical and geographical setting and social milieu a true and
convincing picture of South Indian life, indeed of human life in one or other
of its aspects. Some one in each tale–often the teller, and the commentator, if
not the hero–lives this vivid, intense, sane life and presents the heroic with
admiration, the pathetic with pity and the comic with a smile. By his power of
sympathetic imagination, the all-comprehending charity which is Brahma’s
greatest gift to his chosen Children, Masti creates for each situation, however
coarse or exquisite, however high or low, a set of characters with the adhikara
to act in it or to contemplate it. He loves them all, but judges none. He
succeeds by sheer self-effacement. He sows himself, his opinions and
prejudices, and reaps a rich harvest of living men and women.
* SHORT STORIES in
four volumes–By Masti Venkatesa Iyengar, with a foreward by Sri C.
Rajagopalachariar. (The Author, Gavipur Extension, Basavangudi, Bangalore.)
Price Rs. 2.10 a volume.