By D. V. KRISHNIAH, B.Com (Hons.)
(Lecturer S. R. R. College, Bezwada)
If diversion into new modes of thought and
expression was the keynote of the first quarter of the 20th century, the next
decade or two are characterised by a liberation of Telugu poetical expression
from every preconceived maxim. Freedom is, therefore, the essence of the poetry
of this period. In their drive towards a new phase, the poets of this decade
carried the craze for destruction to the farthest limit, and irritated even
their immediate literary predecessors. One wonders whether there is anything
still left for these gallant rebels to disobey. Telugu poetry is no longer a
Tagorean echo. Its affinity is with the eruptions of doctrinaire freedom makers
all over the world. This is not mere cultural subservience, but the expression
of an urge to create something brand new.
This intense desire for freedom is, unfortunately,
not related to any genuine, original movements in Telugu literature. It is due
rather to the divorce between life and literature. While the poets of this
decade declare themselves against the old idealism, they are not sure what
their new idealism is; they cannot continue the old trends, nor create the
emotional background for the new writing. These Telugu poets have little
experience or capacity, so that their best efforts at transplantation of the
modes of western writers of today are little better than parodies. The latest
writers, therefore, began to fall in line with the post-war poetical theories
of England, France, Italy, Russia or Germany. Imaginism, Impressionism,
Futurism, Dadaism and a host of other eccentric doctrines like Expressionism
and Cubism were imported with competitive zeal. The crowning point of these
imitations is Surrealism.
In this decade, “Uma Vijaya Maheswar Vinayak”
(Sistla Umamaheswara Rao of Guntur) started as a poet of transition from the
romantic lyricism of the early twenties to the surrealism of “Sri Sri”
(Srirangam Srinivasa Rao of Vizagapatam). In his Vishnu-dhanuvu he is
almost an echo of Krishna Sastri in the love content, though he introduced some
original metrical features. The language is less classic and flowery than that
of Krishna Sastry. The metre is free from the ornamentation of Yati and Prasa.
Rhythm exerts little influence in controlling the flow of words. A new reader
is tempted to read it almost like prose, though with a slight musical blend it
assumes “readable” form. But this has nothing to do with the poetic value of
the work. If ever the new trends should prove of lasting value, Uma must get
the credit for sounding the death-knell of old Vrittas like Utpalamala
and Mattebha. In his emotion he is malleable like Krishna Sastri,
but in thought he is aggressive like Viswanatha Satyanarayana. His eroticism is
never monotonous, for, in wave after wave, the detail and the thought press
themselves on the reader’s consciousness. He casts the entire idea into a
matrix of accompaniments, so that what is said always predominates over what is
left unsaid. The intensity of the poet’s vision is coupled with an inability to
reader that vision into intelligible form within a brief compass. It is
sometimes argued that the subtler the idea the more far-fetched will be the
appropriate diction, so that the highest poetry is necessarily beyond the reach
of the common man. But this does not seem to be true. There are several
examples of good poetry in every literature clothed in common diction,
especially where the poetic content so transmitted is of a high order. Kalidasa’s
Raghuvamsa with its simple vocabulary has limitless potentialities of
interpretation. It depends on the reader to what extent he can seize the
implications of Kalidasa’s lines. Sublime and pithy sentences convey feeling
quickly and open up great vistas. From this point of view, Uma fares badly in
the later portions of Vishnudhanuvu.
The greatest contribution of Uma to Telugu
literature is his remarkable manner of pressing into service classical figures
of speech to convey new sentiments. Viswanatha was struck by “the repetitive
mental outbursts of this enchanted young man, springing up like the ten heads
of Ravana under the influence of nectar”. But at some places, Uma falls into
confusion and inaccuracy, His references to music, Yoga and Vedanta are full of
ill- understood statements:
“In the terrific fire of adwaita imbedded,
Are the particles of Dwaita and Visishtadwaita,
The devotion of Veerasaiva,
The embodied form of the unembodied bliss absolute;
As the white gem glitters and sprinkles into
colours seven,
This devotion puts on the lights of Enemies
Six,–Kama Moha and others.
The lords of elements six, rule the worlds six, the
last,
The domain of Sankara, the seventh world.
Attaining this, the negation of individual perfect,
In Nirvana, the negation of individual,
The pinnacle of wisdom is he, the triad of
sat-chit-ananda
He alone disappears into the Bliss of Adwaita”.
This is even more evident in his language.
Consonance of word and meaning (Sabda-artha-sahitya) is often absent.
His imagination is powerful and his ability to hark back to ancient culture is
noteworthy. Referring to, the pangs of separation, he says:
“As Bharat without Gita–This book of my heart
Became stale. In your heart,
That things are inscribed? Who knows? Dear,
As the head of Aswathama deprived of the
Kausthubha,
Lusterless is my head–without the imprint of your
love;
My life is dragging me somewhere! I know not!
As the chariot of Arjuna, with no Krishna inside”.
But, as the massage is not clear, these do not
achieve anything substantial.
In his Navami-Chiluka, Uma’s adventures into
delightful prose deserve attention, as they promise to build up children’s
literature. Recently, Uma’s work has entered on a new phase. He is developing a
powerful poetic concept round ‘Kalingi’. According to his strange etymology,
‘Kalingi’ is made up of ‘Kala’ (art) and ‘Ingita’ (commonsense), and is related
to certain aspects of culture, religion and the humanities. The impression of
Vedanta is so deep on this poet that he struggles unendingly with the
controversies about Dualism and Non-Dualism, without a correct grasp of either.
He appears to admit the eternality of ‘Kali’ or ‘Parasakti’. This and other
ideas are plunged in impenetrable confusion, and fantastic allusion:
“Between morn and morn, the western and eastern
walls,
In the form of silence after death, before it
sprouts,
As the seed waiting in darkness,
Your abode is built. In creation and destruction,
Life’s tumults of suffering, hilarious outbursts of
mirth:
Your shrieks “Hram, Hreem, Hroom, Hrah”.
Merging all these, the silent cycle of time,
Like a golden waist-belt is your jewel,
The hanging blue balls, like enchanting buds,
Nagaswaras–the serpent voices broadcast.”
In this strain page after page is filled. Perhaps
only a Freud can interpret the causes for such passages.
Due to the exaggerated sentiment of freedom in this
decade the remarkable gifts of Uma have been somewhat misplaced. In a different
context, he might have produced some masterpieces. His interferences with print
and the bracketed arrangement of words are merely casual and need no special
mention. His free coinage of words like ‘Santini’ (in the sense of ‘morale’)
indicates the measure of his independence; it offers no solution for the
difficulty of choosing technical terms.
Uma represents the peak of modernity and freedom
combined with great poetic potentialities and the impact of classicism in
ideology and imagery. He destroyed the old metrical and grammatical framework.
His diction, though classical, is confined to short and broken phrases, rather
than long Samasas. He revived interest in music, Yoga and Vedanta. His
expression is for the most part ‘Indian’. In him there is greater contact
between life and literature than in most of his predecessors or successors. He
is a realistic idealist and a strange combination of the normative and
heterogeneous aspects of life. We should discard his confusion and accept the
spirit of his writing.
Historically, Sri Sri is the next outstanding
personality in the modernist movement. This influence is far more elaborate,
his freedom concept richer in content, and his popularity wider than that of
Uma. Sri Sri is literally the maker of the new decade. All on a sudden, Telugu
poetry is filled with imitations of all the leading literary movements of the
West. It is no exaggeration to say that his ‘Maroprapancham’ - (‘a different
world’) created, a sensation in literary circles. Here are a few lines:
“March Forward, on and on,
See ye not the burning blaze,
Of Treta, in that different world! ! ! !
Rising,
Rising,
Rising they fall,
Millions of mountains big!
Whirling,
Whirling,
Whirling the seas,
Dancing are in Deluge water!
Is it the burning oil? No!
A pool of hot blood!
Like Sivasamudram and Niagara,
Run on, Run Forward,
On and on, March on and on!
The bronze drum of that different world,
Beats incessantly Lo!
As serpents wild,
And dogs enraged,
Or like Dhananjaya,
March! On!
See ye not of that different world,
Flashes of the crown of fire,
The twinkles of the red banner,
The gushing of the ritual flames!”
If Uma was a forerunner who could look to the
future in the prevailing atmosphere of romantic lyricism, Sri Sri was the man
of the hour. All the new poets of this decade are, directly or indirectly,
bliss followers. I am not sure whether he got his inspiration from Uma or
worked independently, or both. When Uma started writing, he was deemed an
eccentric, but in the hands of Sri, Sri the new poetry becomes a recognised trend,
exploring, and extending into, fresh ground.
The difficulty of estimating Sri Sri is due to the
lack of a collection of his works, and the absence of any elaborate theme
worked out in full. Sri Sri is versatile. He is a poet, a prophet and a critic.
In him, he have a resurrection of Guruzada Appa Rao, in diction and metre. His
words are appropriate and direct. In every piece, there is a new metre. I have
noticed in the poems I collected four or five types of ‘Mutyalasaramu’
(‘Garland of pearls’) with slight alterations of feet. ‘Chedupata’, ‘Avataram’,
‘Batasari’, ‘Jayabheri’, ‘Unmadi’ are interesting specimens in such metres. All
the new meters created by Sri Sri are capable of being brought within
systematic prosody. His ‘Khandasasi’ is like a perfect medieval Telugu verse
with Yati and Prasa. This has affinity with Dwipada. In
‘Advaitam’, ‘Navakavita’, ‘Pratijna’ and ‘Desacharitalu’ the meters are
promising and if worked up with proper theme and content, they present
unexpected poetic possibilities, and prove worthy vehicles of higher thought.
Thus nobody has revolted more than himself against his own dictum that “all
metres should go!” His poetry is purely metrical, though he has occasionally
attempted free verse. Sometimes, he deliberately disturbs the metrical harmony.
Sri Sri’s works are more musical than poetical. He does not possess the intense
imagination of Uma, while sound selection, word-grouping and rhetoric play a
greater part. The love-theme does not absorb him or excite his feeling. Exuberance
of expression persists, instead of poetic reticence. In a song, ‘On
Bitterness’, there is repetition and word-jumbling carried to unreasonable
limits:
“No happiness, no essence
Bitter poison, Life’s fruit,
Life’s fruit, Bitter poison,
Bitter, Bitter, Poison, poison.”
“Yes it is, True it is,
It is true, what you said,
What you said, what you said,
What you said, Truth, Truth.”
“No happiness, No happiness,
No happiness, in this world,
Life is, futile, Learning futile,
Poetry futile, Futile, Futile.”
It is significant that Sri Sri has taken cudgels
against the older generations and preached principles of poetry which he never
practiced in their entirety. The essence of his teaching, however, is freedom
from all conventions of language, prosody, and culture. Though he has not
coined many new expressions, nor distorted the meaning of the old, he is an
advocate’ of both methods, and his followers have adopted them. As regards
prosody, the aim of the new movement is twofold: (1) to destroy everything old
and create individual prosody like Sri Sri, and (2) to bid good-bye to verse
and prosody altogether and write in some kind of prose like “Pathabhi”. Sri Sri
has advocated the latter course, but himself held on to the former. Sri Sri is
a universalist in culture. His ambition is that all new movements in all
countries should find an echo in Telugu poetry: the range of inspiration should
extend from the aboriginal of Central Africa to the highly technical scientist
of the Third Reich. Freudian principles have a special fascination for Sri Sri
and his disciples.
Sri Sri attacks all types of exploitation with real
poetic talent. In a powerful yet balanced metrical piece ‘Desa” Charitalu’ (‘
History of the Nations’), he says:
“The history of any country, you see,
What achievement, object of pride is there,
The vast history of humanity,
An intense policy of exploitation.”
“The vast history of humanity,
An attempt at mutual extraction,
The vast history of humanity,
A drench in blood of battle.”
“A place which is not a battle ground,
Is not to be found in the earth all round,
The past is plunged in blood,
Or else in tears in flood.”
“At the dawn of the rise of history,
How humanity shone in life?
Which country, at what time,
Attained which ideal of great value?
Which sculpture, which culture,
Which science or art,
What lights have flooded the world?”
Patriotism has been perhaps discarded by him as
“racial passion” and India’s territorial and cultural integrity makes little
appeal to him. In him, there is neither the inferiority complex of slavery nor
the ambition and the longing for emancipation. According to him, it is life
that should conform itself to literature. To this limited extent, he adopts
perhaps unconsciously the didacticism of the ancient idealists. Poetry, to him,
is the means of contacting the most forward positions in intellectual and
cultural advance, taking the entire universe as a unit. It is this thought that
associates Telugu poetry with the latest theories, political, economic or
cultural, current in every country, though the orient appears to him as static
ruins, or as a slow absorbent of the occidental dynamic. Poetry is not, or need
not be, conditioned by the poet’s environment. Thus Sri Sri placed before the
younger generation the experiments of all lands for imitation and assimilation.
He invited them to taste the adventure of swimming through different waters.
It
is hazardous to speak of the content of his poetry, as there are renderings of
several European writers without the source being mentioned. No foreign school
of expression exclusively controls his work. There are traces of a mild form of
symbolism. The mingling of a few English words in some of his pieces does not
justify the application of the term ‘Dadaist’ to him. His free verse in
‘Vyatyasalu’ and ‘Kavita Oh Kavita’ is swift and aggressive, and mirrors the
impatience of one in the throes of a rebellion, worrying to bring it to birth
in hot haste. In ‘Vyatyasalu’ (‘Differences’) he says:
“Round
life’s intricate corners alone centres our attraction,
Our
point of view is circumlocutory,
Having
no beginning, no end.
Transitional
beings we are, creatures of doubt,
Questions!
…. All are questions!
Answers,
not satisfactory!
“We
have no walls,
Unrest
is our life,
Agitation
is our breath,
Rebellion
our philosophy,
Thorns
stones……whatever the obstacles,
We
go ahead.”
Sri
Sri is beset by certain disadvantages. Though gifted with a clarity of
expression, which never descends to the commonplace, his musical tendencies
betray him. Meaning is subordinated to sound affinities. He is the only modern
of this decade who observes ‘Prasa’ even in his new metres. In days when
poetical music is discarding the sound magic of ancient verse this is a
reactionary feature. I believe that is the main reason why Sri Sri rarely rises
above the level of temporary amusement or cheap chastisement. I have not known
him work out a theme either in narration or in abstract sentiment. As a poet,
therefore, his actual contribution falls far lower than is warranted by his
revolutionary writings. His “Introductions” sometimes, and his Radio Talks on
modern poetry give him a status similar to that of Sivasankara Sastri in the
previous decade.
Sri
Sri has given a lead to the younger poets. But his main achievement is the
perfection of the living Telugu as the medium of poetic expression. More than
Uma, he has raised this to the status of a literary “form”. He uses allegory of
an advanced type, leading to symbolism. Depicting the vacillating sympathies of
on-lookers, he remarks so picturesquely:
“In
bursting fires,
When
I fly into the sky,
Struck
with wonder they look!”
But this appreciation
of these admirers coolly betrays one m times of ‘adversity:
“Vomitting
blood,
When
I drop down to the ground,
In
merciless disdain, the very people!”
His
language never descends to mere colloquial slang; nor does it depart from the
elegant and forceful contemporary form in search of the high-flown and the
ornate. In his symbolism, he is as unsystematic as Uma in not selecting easily
comprehensible objects in common life. His jugglery of sounds partly prevented
such right discrimination. But he is far more direct and expressive than his
successors. After him, poets like Naryan Babu have used far too much of
Sanskrit, while others like ‘Pathabhi’ have used far too little of it. Sri Sri
always maintains a poise in this respect.
Sri Sri’s creative genius will find fuller
expression, and win greater recognition, if he cultivates a cultural background
supplying the requisite poetical content for his new verse forms, instead of
being satisfied with prophetic announcement about the new trends in Telugu
poetry.