Telugu Writing in the Industrial Age
By Dr. D. V. K.
RAGHAVACHARYULU, M.A., D.Litt.
(Andhra
University)
Industrialisation, with its increasing emphasis on urban development, and the mechanisation of the means of production and distribution, has naturally meant a disruption of the traditional balance between the individual and the society. The migration of groups and individuals from the villages to the urban centres resulted in a dislocation of rural economy based mainly on the joint-family. The new conception of function in the shape of service has resulted, along with other transforming influences, in the breakdown of the caste-system and the emergence of a vertical arrangement of classes. It is a moot point whether a distinctive proletariat consciousness, with a well-differentiated ethos and a way of life, has yet found its full, authentic expression in the arts. But an expanded and restive middle-class has arisen, motivated by tensions and resolutions peculiar to its psychology and temperament. Telugu poetry and fiction in the last three decades are almost exclusively a bourgeois phenomenon, reflecting its mental dilemma in every sphere of life.
The
mass-production of books, and of printed matter, effecting a speedy
crystallisation of public opinion, has created an unprecedented correlation
between the tastes of the reading public and the standards of authorship. The
writer, while remaining true to his own authentic feeling, has also to
articulate ‘public truth’ faithfully and in a responsible manner. Conformity to
public taste has led at times to the vulgarisation of art, as reflected in the
growth of shady literature in its infinite variety. Our literature, on the
whole, has become more contemporaneous and adequate in its realistic illusion
than ever. Modern journalism, with its improved methods of printing and rapid
distribution of books, has given rise to new forms like the serial novel, the
skit, the card-story, the book-review, etc. The paucity of leisure and
increasing time-mindedness have made miniature art-forms all the more popular.
The well-built long poem is now a rarity; the lyric and the ‘Khanda-Kavya’ have
become the staple forms of poetic communication. The short-story and the
one-act play a direct product of the Industrial Age; and even the novel is
dually giving place to the novelette. Our drama has been successfully
eclipsed by the cinema, and is now mostly limited to amateur staging and
competition performance. The essay, the reminiscential and introspective
sketch, the scenario, the flash-back, etc., have also stemmed from the new
environment. The railway line has suggested a new technique of story-writing,
where the writer symbolically depicts the tantalising parallelism
in the thought-sequences of his characters. The post-office has stimulated
the writing of stories and poems of the correspondence type. The radio has
produced the ‘air-script’ and is truly creating a silent revolution in our
public taste.
Apart
from these formalistic changes, recent writing in Andhra reveals our easy susceptibility
to the neighbourhood of ideas, thanks to the new international context of
thought. The Telugu writers of the mid-twenties had departed from the purposive
direction and contemporary consciousness stressed by Viresalingam, Gurujada and
Gidugu. The Bhavakavis were all languishing sentimentalists who strained every
stray rose into bleeding emotion; their romanticism was a revolt of solitary
instincts against the bonds of the past, and, lacking the support of any
movement of the aggregate, it tended to relapse into pure mysticism. Their
pantheism and pessimism, and all their love-lorn melodies, appeared to be
unreal and fantastic in a world of changing values and floundering patterns.
‘Sri Sri’ and Sishtla led the new march towards goals proper to an industrial
set-up. Likewise, the novelists turned from their magic moonings into forgotten
antiquity to the complexities of the modern world, and began preparing the
minds of men for the new social evolution. Contemporary poetry and fiction have
played a mutually complementary role. Poetry has become the emotive restatement
of social experience, while the novel has become the medium for a searching
analysis of the motivation behind human conduct, moulded as it is by the new
techniques and the materialistic format. There is a striking correspondence
between the reactions of the poets and the findings of the novelists.
Modern
literature reflects, besides, the disinheritance of the middle-classes. The
joint-family has ceased to be an economic unit and its authoritarian aspect has
been questioned by the ‘young rebels’ trained in the Western concepts of
freedom and individualism. The value of work, of initiative and occupation, has
been upheld and ‘Sri Sri’ has even sentimentalised the concept of works:
“Who
were the porters that heaved the marble that built the Taj?
The
lower middle-classes are in sympathy with the working classes, and the writers
have tried to articulate the latter’s aspirations. But they are not prepared to
recognise the identity which modern change has forced on their class with the
lower ranks, and have, consequently, become ‘broken-minded and broken-hearted’.
The plight is poignantly depicted by ‘Sarada’ in his Apaswaralu which
deals with the reversals in the economic situation and the social status of
individuals in various classes following industrialisation.
The same despondent dualism is revealed in our attitude to tradition. Industrialisation and technology have mixed up castes and communities, but the persistence of old loyalties to the group and the new militant sub-casteism among the historically neglected communities have retarded the growth of a homogeneous industrial society. Some writers have been pleading for a return to sanity and social certainty offered by Neo-Brahminism, for example, Viswanatha in his Veyi-Padagalu and Cheliyali-Katta and Dharma-Chakram. Tripuraneni and Tapee opposed all such regressive revivalism, but unwittingly gave rise to a different sort of sectarian communalism. Others, like Bapiraju, believed in a cosmopolitan structure of society, based on individual merit and economic justice.
Industry
and technology have revolutionised our whole outlook on life, and our attitudes
to men and things. In the old days a stable equilibrium between the individual
and the community was provided by the Doctrine of Karma, which contained
extreme personal individualism and extreme social authoritarianism within a
single cultural pattern. But, with the advent of science and power in our life,
the agents of creative integration are fast disappearing. The human intellect
and initiative that can harness nature and transform society constituted the
new reality, whereas the Doctrine of Action was apt to degenerate into one of
inaction, and the belief in fatality meant a definite retrenchment of the
natural human personality. The new concept of opportunity eliminated that of
chance, the physical replaced the metaphysical, Revelation and Incarnation gave
place to Nationalism and Evolution. For the moment, at any rate, Materialism
and Marxism seemed to offer a new frame of reference for our intelligentsia,
within which the ‘Progressive Writers’ were to visualise and forecast social
transformation. However, what characterises the intellectual life of Andhra,
and is faithfully reflected in the literature, is not the
evolution of new patterns of adjustment, but the perpetual Gordian-knotting of
the problem of existence and survival, and the lack of incisive responses and
arguments designed to meet them. Gopichand’s Asamardhuni Jeeva-Yatra portrays
the decline and fall of the middle-classes through the character of its hero,
who is incapacitated for action by the modern dilemma and, having lost his
moorings on life, ends in an ignoble futility which is worse than the suicide
he actual commits.
This
intellectual uncertainty and emotional unproductivity of life are also
responsible for the bewildering multiplicity of movements and techniques in our
poetry and fiction. Our poets have all too readily succumbed to literary
developments elsewhere and have with much clamour and gusto imitated every new
form. Realism, sur-realism, dadaism, futurism, impressionism, psycho-analysis,
behaviourism, the stream of consciousness, and existentialism have all been
smuggled overnight into our literature. All this would not have been possible
but for the speedy diffusion of ideas through advanced technology; nor could
these novel media of expression incarnate our attitudes, had it not been for
the internal change necessitated by the Industrial Revolution. One sure
indication that these factors have not stopped at the surface of our life, but
have indeed struck deeper roots into our consciousness, is their capacity for
being employed as poetic ‘properties’. ‘Arudra’ contemplates the ‘Brave New
World’ of material comfort and spiritual poverty:
‘Push
the button and switch on the moon,
Push
the button and switch on the breeze’–‘Arudra’
The
major poets of the post-Depression period have all ransacked modern science and
the industrial situation to discover the new technology of poetry for handling
the new emotions and states of mind. The younger generation have made bold
experiments with language in conspiracy with modern life; ‘Arudra’, Byragi,
Anisetti, Kundurti, Somasundar, Dasaradhi, Narayana Reddi, Ramadas, Rentala,
Elchuri, Varada and ‘Ajanta’ have all tapped the new sources of perception to
suggest a wide range of experience. The following ‘evolving metaphor’
illustrates how deep the technological figure has entered into the modern
consciousness:
‘The
train you wish to take
Is
late always by a life-time;
Sick
with waiting for years and yore
Blindly
would you rush into some carriage
When
the rag-bag luggage of your ideals
Is
labelled ‘Excess’ by a pluming T. T. C.
Your
ramshackle hopes in trunks arranged
Must
then be shoved into the brake-van of dreams.
Maybe
the train may steam off
Ere
all your belongings get on board;
Better
you had left some behind
In
safe custody with your favourite heroes
The
city you would have left for
Shall
not be reached the while that you live:
“Good
God! what hast Thou done unto me?”
So
protest, and stay put where you are!’
‘Arudra’: The
Water Clock
We
find divergent attitudes to the reception of Industry and Technology in Telugu
literature. While the ‘Progressive Writers’ have hailed them as signaling
prosperity for all and the eventual control of power by the workers and the
peasants, others, pressed by their middle-class complexes, are apprehensive of
losing their separate identity in the coming patterns of life. City-life has
led to a considerable impoverishment of the middle-classes, whose subsistence
economy does not readily fit them into the framework of a decent urban life.
The villages, too, are in a process of rapid sophistication; the ludicrous
incongruities arising out of modern Ruritania trying to ape the manners
of the Coketown have figured in our contemporary satire and comedy alike. The deep-seated
reluctance among educated youngmen to go back to their village homes has again
created new tensions between the town and the village. This has become the
thematic nucleus of several stories and sketches written by Narla, Gora Sastri,
Hita Sri, Kutumba Rao, Padma Raju, Bucbi Babu, Bharadvaja, Anisetti and others.
G. V. Krishna Rao’s novel, Keelu-Bommalu, contrasts the
self-effacing sacrifice and transparent sincerity of the ideal village with the
hollow egotism and rank opportunism of the industrialised town.
It
is to the problem, however, of the de-personalisation of the individual himself
in an industrial and mechanised society, along with the one that concerns his
reinstatement and rehabilitation, that most of our writers have turned their
minds. The monotony, weariness and boredom of modern life, its pretensions and
attitudinisations, its moral blankness and spiritual negation, its squalor and
misery and ugliness, have all been mirrored in contemporary poetry,
particularly in ‘Arudra’s Tvamevaham and Byragi’s Nooti Loni
Gontukalu. Here is a moving picture of the de-humanised Man:
‘Every
man in a room
And
white-ants in every mind;
Every
man in mid-stream
And
a whirl-pool in every heart;
Every
man in a prison
And
a gallows in every mind;
Every
man in a machine
And
screws and nuts in every heart;
Every
man in a furnace
And
a smoking chimney in every mind;
Every
man in ambush
And
a tiger rampant in every heart;
There’s
in each heart a red, ruined grave,
A
death-bed, a winding-sheet and a lipless skull;
In
the giant old banyan a cavernous hollow
And
in the hollow a gentle cooing dove:
Where’s
the exit? Where’s the way to wing away?
Oh!
where’s the bright dappled skiff
To
get ashore beyond the thickening night-shades?’
–Byragi
Anisetti
Subba Rao, in his lyric entitled ‘Bhayam bhayam, braduku bhayam’, has voiced
the helplessness of the individual, without roots and without hope, against the
grim inevitability of failure in the struggle for existence. The psychological
moment is given a vivid aesthetic concretion by Rachakonda Viswanatha Sastri,
in his Alpa-Jeevi. Subbiah, the central figure, is riddled with doubt
and perplexity, and is horribly ingrown. Orphaned in early life, he gropes
through the maze of modern industrial society for friendships he cannot make,
and lives in ‘automatic hostility’ with others. He finds no purpose in a
universe in which he is somehow unavoidably involved and so becomes isolated
and benighted. He tries to exercise the assertive side of his personality,
which is unnatural to him, and fails to have the desired ‘moral holiday’. The mechanical
and routine aspects of life have made him fall ridiculously short of the final
personality. He is recognisably a human ‘type’ produced by the vast
dis-orientation of habits and values in the modern set-up. Similarly, the
unreal existence of a rootless middle-class is fictionalised by Buchi Babu in
his Chaitanya-Sravanti, which is a probing into the stream of
consciousness of a traveller in a Madras tram.
Another
side of our disintegrating society is presented in the stories of Balivada
Kanta Rao, Pinisetti, Pantula, Padma Raju, Chiranjeevi and others. Chalam, the enfant
terrible of modern Telugu literature, has, in his Sasirekha,
Brahmaneekam, Maidanam and Ameena, unmasked every illusion in our
respectable society. While he attacked the falsity of our conventional personal
relations, he has not spared the pathology of our modern pretences, either. His
revolt against modernity is a natural extension of his revolt against
conventionality. His main grudge against the old sexual arrangements was that they
were unnatural and uncreative. But he found that in an Industrial Society, too,
the same evils were capable of recrudescing in a different form. In a
mechanized society, the natural instincts of men and women become moped and
their sexual attitudes artificial, repetitive and subdued. The mass-production
of goods inevitably entails the mass-production of minds and morals. In all his
works, he has upheld frankness and sincerity, spontaneity and creativity as the
ideals of personal behaviour; and more than any other writer of his day, he has
demonstrated with a steel-bright style, the dangers of total industrialisation
and total technological advance to the free burgeoning of personal relations.
Such,
then, are the searchings and findings of our writers. There is great
forth-sight and introspection among them, but foresight and vision, and an
imaginative realignment of the social consciousness in harmony with the
evolving patterns of life, are yet to come. Many writers have considered the
new developments as Mephistophelian: for example, Viswanatha’s Swarganiki
Nicchenalu is concerned with the problem of Evil symbolised by the machine
and holds out Divine Grace centred in resurgent tradition as the only hope of
redemption; but it is doubtful if many readers have found a safe anchor in his
thought, despite
his sinewy prose and
deadly dialectic. A writer like Adivi Bapiraju, with the milk of human kindness
sometimes overflowing his gentle heart, welcomes the Machine and Industry,
provided there is no obligation to the ‘the Evil One’. He even sees a
Promethean side to science and industry in that they make art, and the creative
rest required for its enjoyment, available to the common man, and widen our
horizon of experience. On the other hand, Buchi Babu, in his Chivaraku
Migiledi, has attempted to attain a synthesis and a reconstruction. His
hero, Dayanidhi, is Andhra to the core, deeply influenced by Chalam, Nanduri,
Viswanatha and Bapiraju, and obtains a glimpse into the three faces of love in
his mixed environment. He sees ‘the skull beneath the skin’ in his urban love;
finds the tyrannical evolutionary femme galante in his rustic love; and
finally he discovers the eternal female in his third love, who escapes this
debasing dichotomy of personality. It is love that belongs neither to
the city, nor to the village, but to both, love that is
purely elemental and innocent of all sense of guilt or guile. Dayanidhi’s dream
is not fulfilled in reality; but to have made such radiant love the centre of
his heart’s musings, even for a short while, is in itself an act of
faith, not easily found in our deferential, incurious society. Komali remains a
rune of hope in a conscience seared by the conflicts of the
industrial age. The writer flees the decaying past and also the uneasy present,
and aspires for a future ‘builded’ on understanding and charity. He wishes that
the Industrial Revolution would be followed by a psychological revolution, when
the Machine, with its many-unfolding marvels, would bring us back to the kindly
intimacy of Nature.
It
will thus be noticed that the modern Telugu poets and novelists have reflected
in their works both the constructive and the disintegrating phases of
contemporary society as it is being shaped by new developments in industry and
technology. They show the urgent need for attaining a new balance in life and a
wholesome healing of the shattered personality of Man in the new environment.
The poets are the prophets of social change and are already making eager
anticipations of a hopeful future lit up by a landscape of plenty and
happiness:
‘Mines
are found and work is found
Factories
have sprung and towns have smiled:
Lustily
today the Godavari swerves into Visakha,
Full
of smiles, too, the Krishna will accost Anantapur.
……………..
And
look! what is left in your hands? the gay
festoon
of Leisure!’
–‘Arudra’ in What
a Dream!