SOCIAL PURPOSE AND TELUGU LITERATURE

By BURRA V. SUBRAHMANYAM

A purposeful man always draws attention. Sometimes he even draws more attention to himself than to his purpose. A literary man who represents a social or political cause serves that cause more ably the more able he is as a man of letters. The Telugu language has had its small share of purposeful literary writing. There has been no more purposeful and no more able literary writing in Andhra, representing social causes, than the work of Veeresalingam. The New Age in Telugu Literature almost began with him. He was a man of heroic dimensions, with an intense belief in the causes he championed, whether within the narrow limits of his municipal borough or in the wider arena of social discontent. And it, strikes me that, if he could not have fought his causes with literary weapons, he would still have fought them–with other weapons! If, in fact, he did not fight with other weapons! For it is on record that he had a select band of followers who were not exactly liveried men of literature, who achieved for him in the battlefields of social emancipation what meek men of the Muses could never have achieved. If Veeresalingam was a man of the Muses, he certainly was not meek. He awes us even now by the magnitude of his social courage. The Spirit of Time spoke bravely through him. On certain planes he moved men in Andhra to think and act as it was given to no man before him or after: not even to Gandhiji. As a man of purpose his achievements were immense and varied. But, here comes the difference, as a man of letters his achievements were not nearly as great.

It is just as well to admit this fact. There was Gurazada Apparao. There was Gidugu Ramamurty. There was even Chilakamarthi Lakshmi Narasimham. These three men, each in his different way, represented the literary cause more completely and more distinctly than Veeresalingam, though all the other three must have shared largely the latter’s social beliefs and disbeliefs. But, judged as literary men, their stature is greater. The literary output of Gurazada Apparao, including the play, Kanyasulkam, is perhaps not a twentieth part in bulk of the literary output of Veeresalingam. But the mellifluous and new-patterned verses of Apparao, his simple and elegant prose, and the characters of Gireesam and Madhuravani in Kanyasulkam are the more authentic beginnings of the modern age in Telugu Literature, compared to which the fables, the essays, the stories, the novels, the dramas, and even the Prahasanas of Veeresalingam seem as classic and cold and distant in time as ancient Rome. Gidugu Ramamurty, it might seem to the indifferent, is of greater significance to the Telugu language than to Telugu literature, but of him it can be said more truly than of any other literary man in Andhra of the past sixty years and more that, without him and his work as a linguist, there could have been nothing like a renaissance in Telugu literature. Language is not just the garb but is the soul of literature. Gidugu Ramamurty, by espousing the cause of Vyavaharika Bhasha, the spoken tongue, saved the Telugu language for the Telugu people. Chilakamathi Lakshmi Narasimham wrote more original dramas and more original novels than Veeresalingam. Lakshmi Narasimham lacked Veeresalingam’s incisive vigour, and he also lacked what one might venture to call Veeresalingam’s malice against evil. But Lakshmi Narasimham’s playful good humour was all his own, and his sense of humour was perhaps as useful a social instrument as Veeresalingam’s seeming vindictiveness. The real literary difference, however, between the two writers is best expressed by saying that in Lakshmi Narasimham’s novel, Ramachandra Vijayam, the classic Prabandha age is half-melted to the modern age, whereas in Veeresalingam’s Rajasekhara Charitram the Prabandha age is still hard and unyielding. Rajasekhara Charitram takes us back and across to Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield on which the novel is modelled, whereas Ramachandra Vijayam is the beginning of the quest of the modern Telugu story-writer seeking life here and today.

Judged as literature with a defined social purpose, Gurazada Apparao’s play, Kanyasulkam, calls for comment. I am not ashamed to confess that I am one of those lovers of the characters of Gireesam and Madhuravani, who regret that these sterling literary creations, and particularly Gireesam, should have been sacrificed by the author to a social cause, and, in the process, translated out of shape. This the author did to suit a drama to which the social theme and the social purpose became more important than the spontaneity of art that first created these characters. Gireesam, who in the beginning bids fair to rank with the world’s best humorous creations for the Telugus, dwindles into a mighty little man of virtue as the play progresses. And to readers and audiences, the play Kanyasulkam in truth dwindles as Gireesam dwindles. Shakespeare dealt more kindly with Falstaff when he closed the theme with Falstaff babbling of green fields after Prince Hal’s repudiation of the old man. To some, however, like my able and gifted friend, Abburi Ramakrishna Rao, who more than once produced Kanyasulkam more than slightly edited, the play really begins where Gireesam ends. For, my friend discovered the truth that, to the real drama of Kanyasulkam, with all its intricate machinations and confusions and, be it said, its defined social themes of bride-purchase, widow-remarriage and reclamation of prostitutes, Gireesam, the nearest approach we have in Telugu literature to Falstaff and Pickwick, was but an obstacle on the producer’s stage, viciously drawing attention to himself and to his wit when the producer was anxious to draw his audience to the theme of the play and to the other (to him) really important characters. And so my friend Abburi Ramakrishna Rao, eliminated Gireesam as far as he possibly could in the production of the play. In this elimination of Gireesam, Ramakrishna Rao did nothing more than complete that unfortunate process to which the playwright himself got committed in his parallel enthusiasm for the social cause: the process of sacrificing his great creature to his little theme. And audiences who love the play as it begins, only because of Gireesam and Madhuravani whom they meet in the first scenes, get impatient, in spite of my friend Abburi Ramakrishna Rao, when the early humour subsides to give place to a very complex and very second-rate drama, in which all the fun around Ramappa Pantulu and Lubdhavadhanulu does not really vary the monotony: except for a straggling short while in the scene in which Madhuravani laughs long and pitilessly (as only Sthanam Narasimha Rao, acting as Madhuravani, can laugh) while Ramappa Pantulu reads out Gireesam’s famous letter to Lubdhavadhanulu.

Coming to a later stage in Telugu literature, skipping the phase in which Unnava Lakshmi Narayana gave us the first powerful Telugu novel, Malapalli, and Rayaprolu Subba Rao gave us melodious songs of peace and patriotism (and no more), and Nanduri Subba Rao gave us his immortal songs, Yenki Patalu, and Adivi Bapiraju created his fine fantasies in song and prose: the most dominant figure, perhaps, as a writer, and, if not the most dominant, certainly the most representative, was the poet Krishna Sastry. Some would probably like to say that the story-teller Gudipati Venkatachalam was the most dominant writer of that period. Some others would probably like to reserve that honour to the poet Viswanatha Satyanarayana. ‘There is no denying, however, that Krishna Sastry was the forerunner of a literary cult, whereas the other two achieved their stature in isolation. Krishna Sastry produced very few verses and songs, but in the geneology of letters, which takes in contemporary writers, he had a plentiful progeny which held the parental example in veneration. Venkatachalam and Satyanarayana were comparatively childless in letters.

Of these three, Venkatachalam was as great a fighter of social battles as Veeresalingam was before him, but the former fought for ideas that would have shocked the latter. The ideas were invariably very modern, and sometimes also very absurd. Venkatachalam wanted ‘progress’ only in the sense that in an intensely personal way he was all discontent for whatever was. It was his major failing that he could not see the direction of progress. And being as impulsive as he was ‘progressive’, and as impatient as he was impractical, he ended up as a social anarchist. His powerful writing, which lacks only in analysis and perspective, destroyed not merely what ought to be destroyed, but more often what ought not to be destroyed, and always threw confusion round what never ought to be confused. A generation hence, when the evil of his influence on the socially immature might come to be of less moment, or almost forgotten, he might rank among Telugu writers with Veeresalingam, and be remembered for the vigour with which he fought for the right of women to their own emotional life, and it cannot be gainsaid that when he fought for it he fought in the direction of ‘progress’. But Venkatachalam cannot relish being classed with Veeresalingam. And, what is more important, Veeresalingam had not in him that great craftsmanship and art of modern writing of which Venkatachalam is an acknowledged master, he being our best and biggest writer of the century in Telugu prose up to now. Venkatachalam, however, is not representative. He is just unique.

Not so unique, perhaps, but still just as unrepresentative, is Viswanatha Satyanarayana. As a writer of prose he holds no privileged place, and his novels are an unorthodox concoction mixed of poetry and philosophy, nearly eschewing characterisation and theme, and this is true in a lesser measure of Bapiraju, but it is as a poet that Viswanatha Satyanarayana has a lasting niche in Telugu literature, and even his worst critics do not deny him this recognition. For the sheer force and Vedic finish of his vocabulary and phrasing, he is a poet. There is a fine fury in his words, though readers like me, unfamiliar with the fountain source of Sanskrit, might sometimes cry out with Desdemona:

“I understand a fury in your words,

But not the words.”

His most vigorous champions and his most violent enemies agree to see in him a going back to the “Brahminical Dark Ages,” which his writings do not quite bear out. As a social thinker, if he is not inimical to ‘progress’, and some would say he was, he certainly is not its protagonist, and he has nothing valuable to contribute to modern ‘progressive’ thought.

In this Viswanatha Satyanarayana as a poet is no better and no worse than Krishna Sastry as a poet. But Krishna Sastry in his later years decided to be more than a poet; or, which is the same, less of a poet; or, to be perfectly candid, no poet at all: and Krishna Sastry when he is not a poet happens to be a very ‘progressive’ thinker. Krishna Sastry might very well quote his contemporary, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, and tell us that he has “ceased to be the poet” and “learnt to be the song.” But, if that be so, we have luckily little to do with the song that is his later life. Concerning ourselves only with the magnificent verses that he wrote–“alas, too few”–it must be said that the music and the magic of them are hard to beat in any literature. And the way he lingers over sounds and words and phrases, caressing them like a lover, shows him as being not just a poet, but one of the makers of modern Telugu, steeped in all the finest traditions of the language: barring, perhaps, the manly and the heroic, which he may be said to have left to Viswanatha Satyanarayana to cultivate. Saying all this is not, however, saying that Krishna Sastry is a progressive writer, in the sense that the writer’s thought as seen in his literary work is socially or politically progressive. More than a decade ago, when I had the doubtful privilege of having to preside over proceedings in Madras that initiate what probably still lingers as the Andhra Branch of the Progressive Writers’ Association, I was both amused and pained to hear one of the more ‘progressive’ speakers claim that Krishna Sastry was a ‘progressive’ poet merely because, as a poet, he discarded the Prabandha habit of describing woman in the nude. The speaker was obviously referring to the fact that Krishna Sastry started the tradition of describing woman as a formless fancy of the poet’s brain. That Krishna Sastry’s one fundamental failing as a poet, his lack of robustness, should have been the target for praise was a sad commentary on the commentator. Forgetting woman in the nude is not necessarily a sign of progress. D. H. Lawrence did not forget woman in the nude, and he was not calling back the Dark Ages. Lady Chatterley’s Lover may be nudity with a purpose, in a sense in which the descriptions of nudity in Manu Charitra and Vasu Charitra are not. But the formless fancies of Krishna Sastry are themselves socially purposeless, and purposelessness should be reckoned a literary sin (by those who reckon sins!) whether in the description of woman as nude or in the description of woman as formless. In fact, there could be no more purposeless writing, from the social viewpoint, than the songs and verses of Krishna Sastry. He is as purposeless as Veeresalingam was purposeful. There is no social content in his literary work, no awareness of a social order or disorder. If any single literary man in Andhra could be charged with the offence of having led literature away from corporate life, away from social reality, away from every healthy contact with live fellow human beings, that writer is Krishna Sastry!

Krishna Sastry’s great rival, not certainly in leading literature away from life, but in creating things of arresting beauty, is Srirangam Srinivasa Rao of the next generation, who calls himself Sri Sri. Sri Sri is a modern. He is the sport of all the winds that blow. Deep as his roots are in the great literature that belongs to him and to which he belongs, he is not really fond of the roots. He is even suspicious of them. He would rather that Telugu literature was not a tree with root and branch, but a mansion with many rooms that could be lifted and placed in the heart of any modern city of Europe, America or Asia, without changing scene or changing habit. When I contemplate his latter-day trends, I think of him as of a mighty tree trying to twist itself away from its roots in order to feed on air. Sri Sri, the author of stirring threnodies like Maro Prapancham, was a valiant youth, on the verge of manhood, eagerly in search of the meaning of life as a poet. Sri Sri, the so-called surrealist, is that manhood attained, without the poet’s realisation of the meaning of life, and he almost ashamed of the eagerness and the valour of his youth. Sri Sri fascinated by Marx is elementary. Sri Sri fascinated by Freud is a fright. And, between Marx and Freud, Sri Sri, the poet, has been singing his own requiem.

It is the curse of our times that the world is changing too fast to preserve the realities of mental growth by the certainties of gradualness. There is growth but no gradualness in Sri Sri. A growth that is not gradual is generally a tumour. It is outside the anatomy of life. Sri Sri’s Dadaist and Freudian extravaganzas are tumors on his literary being. Surrealism, the world over, has been a protest in all arts, and mostly in sculpture, painting and literature, against the hideousness of realism, or against the horror of its inevitability even when it is not hideous. But surrealists were realists first, or should have been. In sculpture and painting, at any rate, the adventures in surrealism were attempted by artists who were already masters of realistic art. To a great extent this is true even of the surrealist of literature. T. S. Eliot’s strength was that, at the least in the maintenance of the outer fashions and forms of literature, he could have been a Browning or a Tennyson if he wanted, but did not want to be. Surrealism has, no doubt, travelled far from Picasso and Epstein and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, but the farther it travels from realism the more it loses its truest significance, namely, its emphasis through discontent on the limitations of realism in art. Taking the example of English literature, surrealist tortuousness and Freudian incoherencies might well follow in the wake of Victorian realism and Victorian volubility as a sheer reaction against the surfeit of realistic art. Distortion and incoherency, unprovoked and deliberate, are unforgivable in all serious art. There is every difference in the world between, on the one hand, a disciplined patient before a psychiatrist, purposefully expressing, or being made to express, his immediate inmost thought, albeit incoherently, in an attempt to regain the equilibrium of life, and, on the other hand, an utterly mad man, loitering outside the pale of reasoning humanity, who has no battle in him to go back to poise, and who mutters because he must, and not because he intends to help either himself or others. Freud was a scientist: nay, more than a scientist, the creator of a science. Surrealists who pretend to be Freudian insult Freud and his science. Such aberrations of surrealism in art might have crept in as literary ennui into the mature world of English or French literature, which, while abounding in realistic forms, touches an exhaustion as a very phase of its fullness. It is a lull in literature, a lull akin to what D. H. Lawrence describes as:

“When a man can love no more,

and feel no more,

and desire has failed,

and the heart is numb,

then all he can do

is to say: It is so!

I’ve got to put up with it,

and wait.

This is a pause, how long a pause I know not,

in my very being.”

Such a pause, however, can only follow a fullness. What, I ask, was the fullness of modern Telugu literature which preceded the lull that is Sri Sri’s surrealism? Or anyone else’s in Telugu literature? What are the songs, the poems, the stories, the novels, the prose and the drama that, with a reiterant and repulsive realism, preceded for a half-century this surrealist ennui? None whatever of abiding worth. Or, at any rate, very little. Quality, as the answer, fails. But, worse than quality, quantity fails too. For, Telugu literature has yet to manifest itself to some purpose in the most elementary forms of realistic art before it can boast of being tired of tears and laughter, or seek to imitate the great literatures of Europe in their vexed repose. Surrealism is largely a natural if undesirable phenomenon in the literatures of the West. Surrealism in languages like Telugu is an utterly unnatural imitation.

In dealing with Sri Sri there is one other point that requires to be emphasized. Surrealism, by its very character, cannot be progressive. Progress belongs to the realm of realities. It is a measure of social growth, the growth of a social order from stature to stature. It is matter for statistical or qualitative apprisement. It is real. Surrealism is unreal. It is a device of distortion in the realm of art. It does not seek either to contribute to the growth of social order or to influence it. Sri Sri, the latter-day surrealist, cannot, therefore, claim, or be claimed, to belong to a class of ‘ progressive’ writers in Andhra, if any such exists.

Pedestrian compared to Sri Sri’s jet-propeller, but prince of poise where Sri Sri is studiously unsound, is Narla Venkateswara Rao, the accomplished editor of Andhra Prabha, whose one-act plays are masterpieces of realism in Telugu literature to which one can turn in peace after the gruesome goings-on of Sri Sri’s surrealism. There may be other playwrights in Andhra who have written a piece or two more worthy of notice than Narla’s one-act plays. For instance, P. V. Rajamannar’s playlet, Deyyala Lanka, with an imperfection here and there–the style is uneven, and the theme jumps at places instead of moving along: but what are a few imperfections to so outstanding a creation?–is still a piece of beauty, almost haunting in its loveliness, a very poem of a drama, all in prose: something quite beyond Narla’s reach, because poetry and drama do not go together with Narla, and Narla’s drama is prose in word and prose in spirit. Probably all pure drama should be prose in word and spirit. That is Shaw, though that is not Shakespeare. And that is Galsworthy too, whom Narla most resembles. Talking of other playwrights, Viswanadha Kaviraju, in some of his delightfully humourous plays, achieved an abandon and a spontaneity of wit that recall the Restoration Drama in English literature. But in Narla, again, like in Galsworthy, there is no abandon at all, and no wit that scintillates on the mere surface of life. In his chiselled little plays, men and women move on the stage, dignified in joy and in sorrow, in peace and in conflict, in greatness and even in meanness, with a restraint almost unbelievable in art, undistorted by Dickensian exuberance or Dostoievskian gloom. Narla’s achievements are those of an artistic mind completely disciplined. He appears dull only to those who have not studied the great value of restraint in art. Narla is modern, unquestionably so. But is Narla ‘progressive’? Narla was progressive in the Telugu literature of the nineteen forties because Narla brought to Telugu writing qualities it sadly lacked during the Sahithi Samithi decades: dignity, balance, and an author’s consistency. But Narla is not ‘progressive’ in the sense of interpreting Marx through literature, or of analysing the social order or of theorising it by means of the drama, or of illustrating the politics of the hour in the propaganda of the hour. To him literature is life, not politics or the science of politics, though, without flinching in social perspective, he shows us the world of today, born out of the world of yesterday, and growing into the world of tomorrow. Unnava Lakshmi Narayana’s novel, Malapalli, was a stirring record of contemporary life. Narla’s plays are a correct record of present-day situations. Live men and women, dealing on their own with plain personal problems, are his theme. But they sprawl out of their problems into the total vastness that is life. His men and their problems are not fixed with a date or filled with a creed. We get to know them in the same attitude of reality and unsurprise with which we meet the certainties of every day. If this is being ‘progressive’, he is undoubtedly ‘progressive.’ But that is all.

To Kodavatiganti Kutumbarao alone among the moderns in Telugu letters goes the distinction of intending as a literary writer to be ‘progressive’ in the socio-political sense. His novel, Arunodayam, in its latter half, is nothing if not a literary experiment in a politically ‘progressive’ test tube. And the experiment yielded–not crystal but tar. I have always felt drawn to Kutumbarao by links stronger than those between fellow-writers or between author and reader. I have always had a deep, genuine admiration for him. In fact, my feelings towards him in the realm of Telugu literature have for long been akin to the feelings which oppressed the average sentimental Englishman towards Princess Elizabeth (now a queen) when she was the heir-presumptive to the throne. For to me, in my generation–and I have seen in the flesh, and talked with, Chilakamarti Lakshmi Narasimham when he was old and Gudipati Venkatachalam when he was young–Kutumbarao has always been, and will be, the heir-presumptive to the throne of Telugu story-writing. After Venkatachalam, he. And meanwhile, Venkatachalam, rebel turned yogi, once surfeit with sex, now surfeit with spirit, nearly lost to literature, and as nearly gathered to his ‘Bhagwan’ at Tiruvannamalai, has left the throne empty. But why does Kutumbarao himself spurn the throne?

The truth has been that Kutumbarao, quite like Venkatachalam, cares very much for himself, and very little for the writer’s throne. His own personal mental processes always meant more to him than his refined and acknowledged creative art, which is of a very high order. In his earlier work as a writer of stories, he had always a very peculiar approach as his technique. His earlier stories did not grow out of his men and women, but his men and women grew into his earlier stories. His later stories reveal a brilliant sense of characterisation, and his art today is almost perfect in that department. But in the beginning he always had an object; usually a very valid object, almost invariably a very pleasing object, artistically speaking, in writing a story which had to conclude in a particular way, on a particular intellectual or emotional note: and his characters incessantly obliged him! Literature to him in those days, and it is sometimes so even now, nearly always illustrated a point view of the author or paved the way to a conclusion already reached by the author. As rarely as Shelley’s Spirit of Delight came, in those days, from this most gifted and most persistent of the story-writers in Andhra today, a magnificent creation or two like Neekemi Kavaali? in which the characters mattered more than the theme, and the theme more than the conclusion. It was, however, an exception, not the rule. When, therefore, more than a decade ago, the Progressive Writers’ Movement swept across Andhra Desa, ably guided by another friend of mine who was then a Communist political worker with an intense belief in purposeful literature, Kutumbarao, I guess, must have felt at last that he had found his soul in art, for he meant now to seek a political and economic creed to work his characters into. The result, or at least the immediate result, was Arunodayam which is the most distressingly immature work up to date of Kutumbarao. He wrote excellent stories before. He wrote even more excellent stories there-after. In between came this half-hearted, unsuccessful politico- literary experiment which ended in a mess because film-producer Nagaiah’s romantic twaddle, Swargaseema, the film story of which was the basis of Arunodayam, did not mix with unromantic twaddle about black-marketing and all that. Kutumbarao is the most able and the most prolific of modern Telugu story-tellers; and if he has not been able to evolve a manner of writing which is at once purposeful and artistic, it ought to make the others pause.

Three other writers who force their way to one’s mind, and who deserve very particular mention because they belong to what I would like to call the younger intellectual school of Andhra writers, are Arudra, who is Sri Sri’s nephew, Palagummi Padmaraju and Somanchi Yegganna Sastry. There are others like the very gifted story-teller, Buchi Babu, whose Chivariki Migilethi is a great new effort in the realm of the Telugu Novel of which any writer can be proud. But he and others like him, with many merits of their own, do not slip into a school of writing. There is ‘Atreya’, the very clever dramatist, who stands best in his knowledge of stage-craft, and who has written several successful plays in prose dealing with modern problems. But his cleverness does not quite touch the intellectual level of the three whom I named. Of the three, Arudra is a man of genius, and Padmaraju and Yegganna Sastry are men of extraordinary talent. All the three have quick minds which react sensitively to modern conditions and modern trends of life, though each reacts in a different way. Arudra reacts as one of God’s own poets. Compared to his uncle, Sri Sri, he concerns himself far more with the poet’s regiment of thought than with the words and the music that march with the thought. Word and sound are mere word and sound to him, and have no essential significance by themselves. His only object is to project an idea. And the words and their music care just the means to project the idea. Mostly his words and their music are in sheer accord with his idea. But he himself does not seem to bother. Word, sound and sense must mix to perfection for him just by accident. He uses uncommon or grotesque words, picking them from any language or dialect, in what seems almost an indecent hurry to proceed to write, but never really is he uncommon or grotesque in thought or expression for the mere fun of being so, without having as his ultimate purpose the victorious putting across of a valid idea. In this he differs very much indeed from his otherwise far more gifted uncle. For Sri Sri, when he is not chaotic, is almost childishly simple. Sri Sri’s normal poems and songs are by no means a canvas on which sheer intellect paints an elaborate motif. His themes are usually emotional, and sometimes very elementarily so. His Maro Prapancham is so elementary in its emotion, and so unguided by intellect, that in the end, if one goes to the root of the song, one feels cheated, realising how much feeling Sri Sri has exploited by sheer emotional and artistic devices without so much as suggesting the object by which the feeling is to sustain itself. Arudra strays into Telugu literature as John Donne strayed into a world of sickly sonneteering, and he stands out as the first real creative protest of the artistic intellect against inartistic emotion in Telugu poetry. Sad to say, the protest is only lodged, not quite pursued. One wishes he had written more in his intellectual strain. The pity with him is that as a creative artist he is not clear, consistent or complete. Possibly, there can be no completeness of art when the artist is ruled largely by the intellect only. Such an artist, half turned critic, usually stands outside life. He tends to become impersonal, and after a time denies himself the benefit of introspection. Introspection is seeking your own roots, and therefore, every one else’s and all nature’s. The roots are emotion, not intellect. Introspection implies one’s yielding to one’s emotional life, and one’s exploring it unashamed and unafraid. When Shakespeare described, in seeming regretfulnees, how he “gored his own thought” and “made cheap what was most dear” to him, he meant that he was unashamed and unafraid of his emotional life, or of the contribution made by his emotional life to his life as an artist. The superior detachment of the intellectual artist is sometimes no more than the shame and fear to

yield to, and to explore, his and everyone else’s emotions. The creative artist who is disinclined to explore his emotional life is like a Christopher Columbus who sails the seven seas but hates to set foot on unknown land. When a creative artist is also a poet, and not a mere writer of prose, this inhibition is almost disastrous to his art. Arudra, the poet, wields an intellectual-artistic medium which can take in controversial social and political thought and yet remain literature, but he has not so far made a consistent attempt or such literature. Therein he has so far failed both the cause of literature and the cause of progressive writing. He is, perhaps, the one modern Telugu writer who need not have failed in the difficult region of purposeful literature.

Palagummi Padmaraju is essentially a writer of prose and a writer of Stories. Barring Yegganna Sastry, he is the most cultured and the most balanced of the writers of his generation. He has learning and perspective. His life as an artist is not just a matter of individual idiosyncrasy. It is permeated by a sense of dignity and high seriousness. The dignity is not the aloofness of a moral prude, and the seriousness is not the sheer absence of humour. Padmaraju, like Gurazada Apparao, whom he resembles in his efforts to raise the tone of Telugu literature, tried to be many things, at his own level of achievement: poet, dramatist and writer of stories. But it is as a writer of stories that he has the superior claim to be noticed. His poems, which are hopelessly few, share the intellectual quality of the poetry of Arudra, but they lack the spontaneity of Arudra, and present instead the stanardized impress of a factory. Of his work as a dramatist, excluding his radio plays which are always pleasant and nothing else besides, I am familiar with only one piece of his which caricatured certain mediocrities of my home town and delighted certain other mediocrities of my home town. To me that play of his illustrates his deficiencies not only as a dramatist but even as a writer of stories: chiefly an emotional incapacity to put himself in the place of another person. Padmaraju is guided largely by his intellect alone, and he is too severely himself to be another person even as an artist. To a very large extent this defect proclaims itself in his stories. They are mostly told from the outside, and by an outsider. The story-teller must always be hovering about, and the characters do not speak. This is the reason why there is generally a great deal of description and comment, and far too little dialogue, in his stories. This is also the reason why his stories appeal only to the extent to which they are a perfect intellectual appreciation of a situation, and afford almost invariably no emotional satisfaction or emotional relief. His all-world prize-story, Gaalivaana, which I, as one of the preliminary judges in Andhra Desa, put first, is a perfect example of his fine qualities as a story-teller and of his exact limitations. It was perhaps a seeking of the opposite quality of emotion which drove him to translate into the Telugu language the heart-throbs of Turgenev, which are like glittering crystals, when he translated Fathers and Sons, and the primitive impulses of D. H. Lawrence, which are like rugged rocks, when he translated The Man Who Died.

But, barring the capacity to depict emotion and all that the lack of that capacity entails, there is hardly any other writer of stories today in the Telugu language who can compete with Padmaraju in variety of matter or versatility of manner. In him, besides, appears almost for the first time in Telugu story-writing a truthful and sympathetic observation of village life, albeit more or less from the angle of vision of the Brahmin community to which he belongs. Very able and facile writers, like my talented friend, Gopichand, who belong to the agricultural community and who observe village life more comprehensively and more from its core, have written extremely pleasing stories, with a comfortably firm local background, about village life. Perhaps, to be able to give perfectly true and complete versions of village life it is not enough even to belong to the agricultural community. The disinherited, like the landless Harijans and the landless laborers, among the other communities must have more to tell than the well-born and the well-bred even among the agriculturist classes. No village society is all of a piece. Its component elements cannot be truly integrated in art except with the aid of the imagination. Belonging to the most important element, the agriculturist land-owning class, is some advantage to the artist, but it is not all. It does not help the understanding of all the sectors of village life, apart or as a whole. Cutting across occupational divisions and economic classes are divisions of caste and sub-caste; and the castes and the sub-castes are so many that the fact of belonging to any one of them, when you have no imagination, is just as unimportant or just as little helpful as the fact of belonging to any other of them. The Kamma, the Reddy and the Kapu of the village are nearly just as familiar as the Brahmin of the village, and nearly just as unfamiliar too, with the intricate details of the domestic life or the economic life of farm-labourers, fisher-folk and small artisans of the village. Telugu literature suffered till very recently by being completely isolated from the life of the community in the villages where yet the bulk of Indian humanity lives, not so much by the fact that Telugu literature was dominated by educated Brahmins as by the fact that the Brahmins who so dominated it were the type who migrated to the town and no longer belonged to the country-side. So understood, this is a defect from which all the great literatures of the world suffer, and the defect is more glaring in the history of all the industrialised countries of the world where urban life attracts the intellectuals, and the rural folk are comparatively less literate. Padmaraju, possibly by the happy accident of his upbringing, and possibly too by his own deliberate choice of matter and manner, is a bridge between the town and the village in Telugu literature. There he holds an asset which some of the best writers of the world lack. However, he lacks the fullness of literary life, as much as Arudra lacks it. He is young, and his gifts are rich and varied, and to these age may still add the art of picturing emotions. One has a right to expect a good deal more from him than that he should remain a prize-boy–standing at the edge of the table, waiting on the Chairman of the evening. But even if he reaches the heights he is meant for, he cannot be a writer with a social or political purpose. He is too intellectual and too individualistic for it.

Yegganna Sastry is chiefly a writer of plays. He has shown considerable skill in writing original plays as well as in adapting into Telugu many well known plays from other languages. His adaptation Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman as Viswam Pelli appears to me to be the best of his efforts. Indeed, no play of any modern author in the Telugu language, whether an original work of art or a translation or an adaptation, comes near it in merit. His adaptation of the third Act, the dream sequel, is superb. He is more effective in adaptation than in original writing. His original work is invariably of a lesser standard of excellence. He has correct stage technique, and a fine sense of piquant situation. His dialogue is sparkling. He is at his happiest and best in the vein of playful criticism of the follies of his countrymen, particularly the Andhras. No one knows their failings more accurately than he. And no one depicts them better.

But his work, so far, as a dramatist reveals serious limitations in his art. He has justified himself only in respect of simple comic themes, but he has not to this day attempted serious emotional drama. Even his comic themes tend to mere caricature. Comedy, as the English Stage understood it through the centuries, and even Shaw did not really fall short of this understanding, has a core of serious emotion which the Comic Muse exalts even while flood-lighting it with humour. The Restoration Comedy tried a little to step aside, but did not quite over-step the mark. Therein lies the difference between caricature and comedy. Caricature is Comedy without a sense of direction. Meredith tells us that true Comedy sees the defects in the object of one’s love without loving the object any the less. The core of adoration may not be denied. That is the secret of As You Like It. Rosalind’s heart and Rosalind’s wit never part company. It is perhaps not fair to Yegganna Sastry or to the Telugu Drama to throw them against the entire background of the English Theatre in assessing Yegganna Sastry’s undoubted success on the undeveloped Andhra Stage. But standards of universal dramatic art cannot be lowered to suit a people who are yet to mark progress. The cause of the development of the Andhra Stage is dear to Yegganna Sastry, as it is to so many others. That development requires that present Andhra audiences should not be pleaded as an excuse for the deliberate creation and production of fifth-rare drama. The audiences of today are not to be taken as the ever-lasting primal intelligence to be played to. Audiences are both as we deserve them and as we make them. Shaw somewhere addresses them as “Ye, compulsorily educated ones! By and large, there is more in them than we deem to be there. In any event, they have to be educated, if slowly, out of all their errors of approach. This is the first duty of good writing and good acting in our country today. Yegganna Sastry is one of the most impressive craftsmen on the Andhra Stage. He has intellectual gifts of the very highest order. He must help to bring the modern Telugu Drama into being. The false phases have yet to end. The true phase has yet to begin.

Two actors of Andhra, Raghavachari of Bellary, he always, and Sthanam Narasimha Rao of Tenali, he in most ways, did their best to usher in the era of the modern drama on the Andhra Stage. The former was an artist of the very highest calibre. Early applause did not spoil him. It spurred him to greater achievement. Cheap applause arrested the growth of Sthanam Narasimha Rao. In his man’s portrayal of women he belonged to a dead age. He tried to walk into the living age–disguised as woman. It was impossible for his audiences, and, worse, for him, to forget his disguise. His art suffered because he had preliminarily to put on the role of a woman, and only thereafter to put on the role of a woman in a particular dramatic situation. The first part belongs to the region of mimicry: the second part alone to the region of art. He had, and has, rare gifts for the second region of true drama. But his audiences were content with his preliminary disguise. They were thrilled at the mere thought of a man imitating a woman so well. They wanted no more from him. As time passed he yielded to the easy, premature applauses of his audiences, and he ceased to grow as a real actor. He became the stereo-typed Chintamani or Chitrangi or Deradevi, the elementary female of sorts, who lacks nuances of character or theme and looks the same in any drama. It was, and has been, the misfortune of the Andhra Stage that the art of these two great actors could not be fed by worthy modern plays written by able modern writers, and that these actors should have been thrown back to mythology or the Middle Ages, or to an occasional second-rate old-world play like Roshanara or second-rate modern play like P. V. Rajamannar’s Thappevaridi.

Yegganna Sastry is without doubt an artist owning a deep social consciousness. He is not one of those who go on writing one-act plays, extolling that medium merely because they are incapable of writing decent full-length modern plays. He thinks, and he is not incapable of feeling. Time and some inner fury must decide that he moves hereafter into the true drama of emotion and social conflict. He is as finely equipped for the drama of social controversy as Arudra is for the poetry of social controversy. But neither can sacrifice art to propaganda. And neither has in earnest attempted literature with a purpose. The intellectual in them is too real. They are too much the masters of their own destiny to be held by a cause. They are not such lettered slaves as can be driven by a caucus or a creed.

There are many other writers in old Andhra and new Telangana, I could name quite a few, of whose talent I had but glimpses and took pure delight therein, and it was my own fault that I was chained to the less important tasks of life and did not study their work with the loving care it deserved. But more than this, the limited subject of purposeful literature prevents me from referring to their valuable contribution to Telugu literature.

In conclusion, I desire to state as my considered opinion that the process of literary creation, which, in the ultimate analysis, is unconscious, abhors social or political purpose which is deliberate. In this, literary creation is not different from life. The Life Principle works its own way. It does not wait upon us. It produces a Buddha, a Jesus, a Shakespeare, or a Gandhi, sometimes. At other times it produces–just our sons and daughters. The Indian mother-in-law and the Soviet politician may fancy products of a particular kind. It may seem nice to the former that the daughter-in-law should produce, for instance, a grand-son instead of a grand-daughter. And it may seem nice to the latter that the Russian literary men should make song and novel of a Five Year Plan instead of writing about Anna Karenina. In the thirties of this century, I distinctly recollect, the great Stalin actually wanted poets and novelists to make the production of steel in Soviet Russia their theme. There is something to be said for literary worship at new altars. But it must be an altar, not a drainage scheme. True, the altar need not always be “the sounding cataract” of England’s Lake District. Cascades of water rushing down the latest artificial dam may be the new “music of humanity.” But before it seeks to trespass into literature it must “haunt” a true poet “like a passion,” not bind a false one like a building contract. Likewise, unless a purpose or a theme becomes part of a writer’s integrated self, woven into the very texture of his dreams, and it is not every purpose or every theme that can so aspire, it cannot make literature. It remains mere pamphleteering.

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