A

History of Indian English Literature - M.K. Naik

Contents
Preface
CHAPTER 1. The Literary Landscape: The Nature and Scope of Indian English
Literature
CHAPTER 2- The Pagoda Tree: From the Beginnings to 1857
Early Prose
Early Poetry
CHAPTER 3: The Winds of Change: 1857 to 1920
Poetry
Prose
Drama
Fiction
CHAPTER 4 The Gandhian Whirlwind: 1920-1947
Prose
Poetry
Drama
Fiction
The Short Story
CHAPTER 5 The Asoka Pillar: Independence and After
Poetry
Fiction
The Short Story
Drama
Prose
Preface
Acknowledged ‘with civil leer’ by many and damned ‘with faint praise* by
some for a long time, Indian English literature, designated variously as ‘Indo-
Anglian Literature’, ‘Indo-finglish I Itcrature' and ‘Indian Writing in English'
(and once even regarded unjustly as part of‘Anglo-Indian Literature’), is now
more than a hundred and seventy years old. In spite of the great pioneering
efforts of Professor K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar— virtually the father of the serious
study of this body of writing— in his Indo-Anglian Literature (1943), The Indian
Contribution to English Literature (1945) and Indian Waiting in English (1962,
1973), a systematic, comprehensive and critical history of this literature, clearly
defining its nature and scope, adopting a proper period-division and relating
writers and schools firmly to changing indo-political conditions .had not been
attempted. Viewing Indian English literature as essentially a significant by-
product of the eventful encounter between India and the Indian ethos on the one
hand, and England, the English language and Western culture on the other, the
present work tries to trace the course nl this literature from 1809, the year when
probably the first < (imposition in English of some length by an Indian - namely,
( V. Boriah’s ‘Account of the Jains’--appeared (in Asiatic Researches, Vol. IX,
1809) to the end of 1979. While the needs o|. a systematic chronological survey
have been kept in mind throughout, the responsibility of rigorous critical
evaluation has not been sought to be evaded. Writers like Sri Aurobindo,
Pitblndranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu have often driven cri-n. 'i ii nd
reviewers into opposite camps, generating both uncritical adulation and
unthinking condemnation. The present work tries to adopt a balanced approach
to these writers.

‘A work is never necessarily finished’, says Paul Valery, ‘for he who made it is
never complete'. This is perhaps specially true of a history of literature, which
involves one single mind's encounters with a large number of authors belonging
to different periods and schools and exemplifying different kinds of sensibility.
The writing of a literary history must therefore necessarily involve the education
of the historian’s literary taste, and I must thank the authorities of the Sahitya
Akademi for giving me this opportunity to acquire such an education.

I have received much help from numerous friends in the compilation of this
history. A forbiddingly large number of books published in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries were not easily available—some of them not even in
reputed metropolitan libraries. B.A. Olkar—an old friend and a confirmed
bibliophile—went expertly hunting in antique book-shops in Bombay, and
similar operations zestfully carried out by my young friends,’ S. Subrahmanya
Sarma and R. Raphael in Madras, S. Krishna Bhatta in Bangalore and G.S.
Balarama Gupta at Annamalainagar also yielded a sizable harvest. Dr. G.S.
Dikshit, Dr. Amalendu Bose, Dr. V.M. Kulkarni, Mr. D.G. Angal, Mr. M.N.
Nagaraj, Mr. N.B. Marathe, Dr. Prema Nandakumar, Dr. Shyamala Narayan, and
Dr. H.S. Saksena also made much valuable material available to me. Dr. V.K.
Gokak, Dr. Chaman Nahal, Dr. Sisir Kumar Ghose, Dr. K. Krishnamoorthy, Mr.
Ruskin Bond, Dr. Nirmal Mukherjee, Dr. Sujit Mukherjee, Dr. M.
Sivaramakrishna, Dr. K. Ayyappa Panikar, Dr. K.N. Sinha, Mr. Lakhan Deb, Dr.
H. Raizada, Dr. R.B. Patankar, Mr. V.D. Trivadi, Dr. Visvanath Chatterjee, Miss
Eunice D’Souza and Miss Kaushiki Sen Verma answered my numerous queries
(I strongly suspect that during the last two years many of my correspondents
must have dreaded the periodic arrival of a hastily w^itf^p little post-card from
Dharwar asking for information).

The librarians and the staff of the following libraries extended their willing co-
operation to me: National Library, Calcutta,; Tagore Museum and Library,
Santiniketan; University of Bombay Library and Asiatic Library, Bombay;
Poona University I .ibrary, Deccan College Library and Fergusson College
library, Poona; Os mania University Library, C.I.E.F.L. Library, Salar-jung
Museum Library, Sir Nizamut Jung Library, State Library and Andhra Pradesh
Archives, Hyderabad; Bangalore University Library, Bangalore; Mysore
University Library, Mysore; Madras University Library, Adyar Library,
Presidency College Library, Connemara Library and Tamil Nadu Archives,
Madras; Sri Auiiobindo Ashram Library and the Romain Rolland Library,
Pondicherry, and the Regional Library and Kamatak College Library, Dharwar.
To Mr. K.S. Deshpande and his enthusiastic band of colleagues at the Karnatak
University Library, Dharwar I owe a special debt of gratitude. The more I asked
for, the more responsive they were (a couple of assistant librarians once even
allowed themselves to be dragged to the Binding Section to search for the back
numbers of periodicals).

In writing about prose of different types—political, historical,' philosophical,

etc., and criticism of Sanskrit literature and the arts, I had inevitably to depend
upon the acknowledged expertise of my University friends belonging to different
disciplines—Dr G.S. Dikshit, Dr K. Raghavendra Rao, Dr K. Krishnamootthy,
Dr G.K. Bhat, Dr S.S. Settar, Dr R.B. Patankar, Dr L.C. Mulatti and Professor
K.J. Shah. Dr Rao and Dr Dikshit also read my typescript and drew my attention
to matters that called for a reconsideration. Prof. R.G. Chenni assisted in
preparing the typescript for the press, Dr C.V. Venugopal read the proofs and
compiled the Index with a mastery born of long practice.

1 am deeply grateful to all these numerous friends and associates. In the final
chapter, I have drawn on my essay, ‘Ini Defence of Indian Writing in English’
included in Indo-English Literature (1977) edited by Dr K.K. Sharma. The grant
of a National Fellowship for three years enabled me to take time off from my
normal teaching duties and also made work in the various libraries possible. My
thanks are due to the authorities of the University Grants Commission and
Kamatak University for this generous gesture.

Before concluding, I must place on record my appreciation of the patience and

consideration shown by the Secretary, the Deputy Secretary (Programme) and
the other authorities of the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, in extending (more
than once) my deadline for submitting the final typescript of this history.

M.K. NAIK

Dharwar, January 1980.

CHAPTER 1. The Literary Landscape:
The Nature and Scope of Indian English
Literature
Indian English literature began as an interesting by-product of an eventful
encounter in the late eighteenth century between a vigorous and enterprising
Britain and a stagnant and chaotic India. As a result of this encounter, as F.W.
Bain puts it, India, a withered trunk ... suddenly shot out with foreign
foliage.’1One form this foliage took was that of original writing in English by
Indians, thus partially fulfilling Samuel Daniel’s sixteenth century prophecy
concerning the English language:

Who (in time) knows whither we may vent

The treasures of our tongue?

To what strange shores

This gain of our best glory shall be sent

T’enrich unknowing nations with our stores.

What worlds in th’yet unformed orient

May come refined with th’accents that are ours.

The first probiem that confronts the historian of this literature is to define its
nature and scope clearly. The question has been made rather complicated owing
to two factors: first, this body of writing has, from time to time, been designated
variously as IndoAnglian literature’, ‘Indian Writing in English’ and ‘Indo-
English literature’; secondly, the failure to make clear-cut distinctions has also
often led to a confusion between categories such as ‘Anglo-Indian literature’,
literature in the Indian languages translated into English and original
composition in English by Indians. Thus, in his A Sketch of Anglo-Indian
Literature (1908), E.F. Oaten considers the poetry of Henry Derozio as part of
‘Anglo-Indian literature’. The same critic, in his essay on Anglo-Indian literature
in The Cambridge History of English Literature(Vol. XIV, Ch. 10) includes Toru
Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore and ‘Aravindo [sic] Ghose’ among
‘Anglo-Indian’ writers along with F.W. Bain and F.A. Steel. Similarly, Bhupal
Singh’s Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction (1934) deals with both British and
Indian writers on Indian subjects. V.K. Gokak, in his book, English in India: Its
Present and Future (1964), interprets the term Indo-Anglian Literature’ as
comprising ‘the work of Indian writers in English and ‘Indo- English literature’
as consisting of ‘translations by Indians from Indian literature into English’. In
his massive survey, Indian Writing in English (1962), K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar
includes English translations of Tagore’s novels and plays done by others in his
history of Indian creative writing in English, while H.M. Williams excludes
these from his Indo-Anglian Literature 1800-1970: A Survey (1976). John B.
Alphonso Karkala (Indo English Literature in the Nineteenth Century) (1970)
uses the term ‘Indo-English literature’ to mean ‘literature produced by Indians in
English.’

Strictly speaking, Indian English literature may be defined as literature written

originally in English by authors Indian by birth, ancestry or nationality. It is
clear that neither ‘Anglo- Indian Literature’, nor literal translations by others (as
distinguished from creative translations by the authors themselves) can
legitimately form part of this literature. The former comprises the writings of
British or Western authors concerning India. Kipling, Forster, F.W Bain, Sir
Edwin Arnold, F.A. Steel, John Masters, Paul Scott, M.M. Kaye and many
others have all written about India, but their work obviously belongs to British
literature. Similarly, translations from the Indian languages into English cannot
also form part of Indian English literature, except when they are creative
translations by the authors themselves. If Homer and Virgil, Dante and
Dostoevsky translated into English do not become British authors by any stretch
of the imagination, there is little reason why Tagore’s novels, most of his short
stories and some of his plays translated into English by others should form part
of Indian English literature. On the other hand, a work like Gitanjaliwhich is a
creative translation by the author himself should qualify for inclusion. The crux
of the matter is the distinctive literary phenomenon that emerges when an Indian
sensibility tries to express itself originally in a medium of expression which is
not primarily Indian. There is, of course, that infinitesimally small class of
Indian society called the ‘Anglo-Indian’ i.e., the Eurasians, who claim English as
their mother tongue; but with notable exceptions like Henry Derozio, Aubrey
Menen and Ruskin Bond, few of them have tried to express themselves
creatively in English. But even in their case, the Indian strain in them is bound to
condition the nature of both their artistic sensibility and their way of expression.
(In fact, the poetry of Derozio is a copybook example of this.) However, since
literature is not a science, there will always be a no man’s land in which all
attempts at strict definition are in danger of getting lost in a haze. Thus, there are
exceptional cases like Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
The former, bornof a Sri Lankan Tamil father and an English mother, was
neither an Indian citizen nor did he live in India; and yet the entire orientation of
his thought is so unmistakably Indian that it is impossible not to consider him an
Indian English writer. As for Jhabvala, she is virtually an international
phenomenon. Born of Polish parents in Germany, she received her education in
English, married an Indian, lived in India for more than twenty years, and has
written in Engtish. This daughter-in-law of India (though a rebellious one, in her
later work) shows such close familiarity and deep understanding of Indian social
life (especially in her earlier work) that she has rightly found a place in the
history of Indian English literature. On the other hand,V.S. Naipaul’s Indian
ancestry is indisputable, but he is so much of an outsider when he writes about
India and the Indians and so much of an insider while dealing with Carribean life
and character, that there can be no two opinions on his rightful inclusion in the
history of West Indian Writing,

It is obvious that Indian English literature, thus defined is not part of English
literature, any more than American literature can be said to be a branch of
British literature It is legitimately a part of Indian literature, since its differentia
is the expression in it of an Indian ethos. Its use of English as a medium may
also give it a place in Commonwealth literature, but that is merely a matter of
critical convenience, since the Commonwealth is largely a political entity—and,
in any case, this does not in the smallest measure affect the claim of Indian
English literature to be primarily a part of Indian literature.

Another problem which the historian of this literature has to face is that of
choosing from among the various appellations given to it from time to time—
viz., ‘Indo-Anglian literature’, ’Indian Writing in English’, ’Indo-English
literature’ and ‘Indian English literature’. The first of these terms was first used
as the title of the Specimen Compositions from Native Students, published in
Calcutta in 1883. The phrase received general currency when K.R. Srinivasa
Iyengar, the pioneer of this discipline, used it as a title to his first book on the
subject: Indo-Anglian Literature (1943). He, however, now agrees that ‘ “Indo-
Anglian” strikes many as a not altogether happy expression." He adds, ’I know
many are allergic to the expression “Indo-Anglian”, and some would prefer
“Indo-English”. The advantage with “Indo-Anglian” is that it can be used both
as adjective and as substantive, but “Indo-Englishman” would be unthinkable.
“Indo-Anglian” is reasonably handy and descriptive." But a major flaw in the
term ‘Indo-Anglian’, as pointed out by Alphonso-Karkala, is that it would
suggest ‘relation between two countries (India and England) rather than a
country and a language.’7 ‘Indo-Anglian’ is thus hardly an accurate term to
designate this literature. Apart from that, ‘Indo-Anglian’ also appears to be
cursed with the shadow of the Anglican perpetually breathing ecclesiastically
down its slender neck, and threatening to blur its identity. (In fact, Professor
Iyengar has noted how, in his book, Literature and Author- ship In India,‘Indo-
Anglian’ was changed to ‘Indo-Anglican’ by the enterprising London printer
who, puzzled at so odd an expression, transformed it into something familiar.)
For his first comprehensive study of the subject, published in 1962, K.R.
Srinivasa Iyengar used the phrase, ‘Indian Writing in English'. Two pioneering
collections of critical essays on this literature, both published in 1968, also
followed his example: Indian Writing in English-. Critical Essays by David
McCutchion and Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English edited by M.K.
Naik, S.K. Desai and G.S. Amur. But the term ‘Indian Writing in English’ has
been accused of having a rather circumlocutory air, and while ‘Indo-English
literature’ possesses an admirable compactness, it has, as noted earlier, been
used to denote translations by Indians from Indian literature into English. The
Sahitya Akademi has recently accepted ‘Indian English Literature’ as the most
suitable appellation for this body of writing. The term emphasizes two
significant ideas: first that this literature constitutes one of the many streams that
join the great ocean called Indian literature, which, though written in different
languages, has an unmistakable unity; and secondly, that it is an inevitable
product of the nativization of the English language to express the Indian
sensibility. Nevertheless, by whatever name Indian English literature is called, it
remains a literary phenomenon worthy of serious scrutiny.
CHAPTER 2- The Pagoda Tree: From
the Beginnings to 1857
The British connection with India was effectively established in the beginning of
the seventeenth century, though the first I nglishman ever to visit India did so as
early as A.D. 883, when one Sigelm, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes, was
sent (here by King Alfred on a pilgrimage, in fulfilment of a vow.

T he discovery of the sea-route to India by Vasco da Gama in 1498 brought the

Portuguese and the Dutch to India long lirfore the British. In early and mid-
sixteenth century, British interest in India mostly remained in the formative
stage. A petition addressed to King Henry VIII in 1511 reads: ‘The Indies are
discovered and vast treasures brought from thence everyday. Let us therefore
bend our endeavours thitherwards.’1I inally, the East India Company which was
to link India’s destiny firmly with Britain for almost two centuries was granted
its first charter by Queen Elizabeth I on the last day of thelastmonth of the last
year of the sixteenth century, as if to usher in a new era in the East-West
relationship with the dawn of the new century.

The East India Company, whose original aim was primarily ommerce and not
conquest, however, soon discovered its manifest destiny of filling the vacuum
created in the eighteenth century India by the gradual disintegration of the
Mughal empire. In Kipling’s words,

Once, two hundred years ago, the trader came/Meek and tame./Where his timid
foot halted, there he stayed,/Till mere trade/Grew to Empire,/And he sent his
armies forth/South and North,/Till the country from Peshawur to Ceylon/ Was
his own.

After the Battle of Plassey (1757) which made the Company virtually master of
Bengal, the British who had come to India to sell, decided also to rule. The
business of ruling naturally involved the shaking of the Indian ‘Pagoda tree' of
its treasures. (One recalls Clive’s famous reply to his detractors after the sack of
Murshidabad in 1757: T stand astonished at my own moderation.’) But those
engaged in shaking the ‘Pagoda tree’ were also instrumental in planting the
seeds of a modernization process in the eighteenth century Indian Waste Land—
seeds which started burgeoning in the nineteenth century. The rise of Indian
English literature was an aspect of this Indian renaissance.

As Sri Aurobindo points out, the Indian renaissance was less like the European
one and more like the Celtic movement in Ireland, ‘the attempt of a reawakened
national spirit to find a new impulse of self-expression which shall give the
spiritual force for a great reshaping and rebuilding.’3 The awakening of India, as
Jawaharlal Nehru observes, ‘was two-fold: she looked to the West and, at the
same time, she looked at herself and her own past.’4 In the rediscovery of
India’s past, some of the early officials of the company played a significant role.
Many of them were scholars with a passion for oriental culture and it was not
unusual in those days to find an East India Company official fully equipped to
discuss the Koran with a Maulana Mohammad Ali and a Purana with a
Viswanath Sastri with equal competence. Sir William Jones, who founded the
Bengal Asiatic Society as early as 1784, H.T. Colebrooke, the author of Digest
of Hindu Law on Contracts and Succession (1797-98), and James Prinsep, the
discoverer of the clue to the Asokan inscriptions, were some of the
representative white men in India then whose burden was certainly not imperial.

While these Englishmen were rediscovering India’s past. (he gradual spread of
English education and Western ideas brought forth a band of earnest Indians
who drank deep at the fountain of European learning. This consummation was
not, however, achieved before the British policy concerning the education of
Indians had passed through two diametrically opposed stages. To begin with, for
almost a generation after the East India Company had virtually become the de
facto ruler of Bengal, the Government had no official education policy, probably
because at that time, even in Britain itself, education had not yet been accepted
as a responsibility of the Government. But soon, practical considerations stressed
the necessity to evolve such a policy. There was a pressing need for suitable
pundits and maulvis to help judges in the administration of justice. It was
therefore decided to revive the study of Sanskrit and Persian among the Indians.
This led to the establishment by Hastings of the Calcutta Madarasa for teaching
Persian and Arabic in 1781 and that of the Sanskrit College at Benaras by
Jonathan Duncan in 1792. The Orientalists among the Company officials
naturally supported this policy enthusiastically. By the turn of the century,
however, second thoughts began to prevail. First, there was an equally pressing
need for Indian clerks, translators and lower officials in administration and a
knowledge of English was essential for these jobs. Furthermore, with the rise of
the Evangelical movement in Britain, the ideal of spreading the word of Christ
among the natives assumed vital importance for some Englishmen. Even before
the close of the eighteenth century, Mission schools which taught English
besides the vernacular had already been functioning in the South, while the
beginning of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of similar schools in
Bengal and Bombay. The missionaries believed that in imparting Western
education to Indians, every teacher was ‘breaking to pieces with a rod of iron the
earthenware vessels of Hinduism.1 The imperialists also championed the cause
of English, which for them was a potent instrument to civilize ‘the lesser breeds
without the law'. They also thought that the spread of English education among
the natives would lead to the assimilation of Western culture by the Indians and
that this would make for the stability of the empire—a view strongly advocated
by Charles Grant, who argued: ‘To introduce the language of the conquerors
seems to be an obvious means Of assimilating a conquered people to them.’

The Orientalists were seriously alarmed at this growing support to English. Their
stand was forcefully expressed by H.H. Wilson, who observed: ‘It is not by the
English language that we can enlighten the people of India. It can be effected
only through forms of speech which they already understand and use.. . . The
project of importing English literature along with English cotton into India and
bringing it into universal use must at once be felt by every reasonable mind as
chimerical and ridiculous.’7 It was however, obvious that the Orientalists were
fighting a losing battle. As K.K. Chatterjee notes, ‘The Home Office despatches
from 1824 onwards went on being increasingly insistent on re-orienting Indian
education to teach the useful science and literature of Europe. ... All the
presidencies in the 1820s were headed by Governors who were generally
inclined to English education, though with varying emphases (Elphinstone in
Bombay, Thomas Munro in Madras, and above all the reformist Bentinck in
Bengal).’

As for the Indians themselves, ihere was no doubt in the minds of most of their
intellectuals as to which way the wind was blowing. Perhaps the most adaptable
of people, they had whole-heartedly taken to Persian some centuries earlier, with
the Muslim conquest, and had mastered that language. It was obvious to them
that a similar strategy with regard to English was now called for. As early as
1816, we find a Calcutta Brahmin named Baidyanath Mukhopadhyaya telling
the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court that ‘many of the leading Hindus were
desirous of forming an establishment for the education of their children in a
liberal manner,’ meaning obviously English education. A strong prejudice
against Western education was indubitably rampant in the conservative circles. It
is on record that the office of the Inspector-General of Schools at Patna was at
one time popukrriy known as ‘Shaitan ka daftarkhana’10(i.e., the Devil’s
Office). Nevertheless, the more forwar<Mqoking among the Indians were
convinced that English education was not the Devil’s wine but a Godsend. So
enthusiastic was especially the younger generation in its desire to learn English
that, as Trevelyan has noted, an Englishman coming to Calcutta by steamer was
pressed by eager boys clamouring for English books: ‘He cut up an old
Quarterly Review and distributed the pages. As the same writer points out, on
the opening of the Hughli College in August 1836,‘there were 1200 applications
for admission within three days.’

The cause of English education found its ablest Indian champion in Raja
Rammohun Roy. In his persuasive Letter on English Education addressed to the
Governor-General, Lord' Amherst in 1823, he argued most forcefully against the
establishment of a Sanskrit School in preference to one imparting English
education:

If it had been intended to keep the British nation in ignorance of real knowledge,
the Baconian philosophy would not have been allowed to displace the system of
schoolmen, which was the best calculated to perpetuate ignorance. In the same
manner, the Sanskrit system of education would be the best calculated to keep
this country in darkness, if such had' been the policy of the British legislature.
But as the improvement of the native population is the object of the government,
it will consequently promote a more liberal and enlightened system of
instruction, embracing ... useful sciences, which may be accomplished by
employing a few gentlemen of talents and learning educated in Europe and
providing a college furnished with the necessary books instruments and other
apparatus.

Even before this letter was written, Rammohun Roy had already been active in
the cause of Western education. Together with David Hume, the British watch-
maker turned educationist and Edward Hyde-East, the then Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court of Bengal, he established in 1816 an Association to promote
European learning and science. This was the first step towards the founding of
the Hindu College at Calcutta on 20 January 1817. Rammohun Roy also founded
at his own expense a school in Suripara (near Calcutta) to teach English to boys
(1816-17).... Rammohun invited the best among them to his house for advanced
coaching by English instructors. He also founded another school in Calcutta
called the Anglo Hindu School (1822).
With the tide running so strongly in favour of English, the coup de grace was
delivered by Macaulay’s famous Minute on Education of 2 February 1835,
which clinched the issue. Macaulay, who combined in himself the spirit of
staunch Evangelism, Messianic imperialism and Whig liberalism, was richly
endowed with a boundless courage of conviction, which admitted no possibility
of there being another side to the question at all. He stated emphatically that it
was both necessary and possible ‘to make the natives of this country good
English scholars’ and that ‘to this end all our efforts ought to be directed.’

In a passage entirely typical of his cast of mind and his style (which made Lord
Melbourne once exclaim: ‘I wish I could be as cocksure of any one thing as Tom
Macaulay is of everything') he declared:

‘The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach
this language, we shall teach -languages in which by universal confession there
are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own; whether
when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which by univeral
confession, whenever they differ from those of Europe, differ for the worse, and
whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall
countenance at public expense medical doctrines which would disgrace an
English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English
boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns 30,000
years long and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.’1

Macaulay did not rest content with championing the cause of English so
strongly; he even threatened to resign from his position as President of the
Governor-General’s Council, if his recommendations were not accepted by the
Government. Lord Bentinck, the Governor-General immediately yielded and the
Government resolution of 7 March 1835 (a red-letter day in the history of
Modern India) unequivocally declared that 'the great object of the British
Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science
among the natives of India, and all funds appropriated for the purpose of
education would be best employed on English education alone.’17

The extremism of this policy was sought to be corrected some time later by Sir
Charles Wood, a member of the Select Committee of the British Parliament in
1852-53. In his well- known Despatch of 19 July 1854, while reiterating the
necessity to ‘extend European knowledge throughout all classes of the people’,
he observed that ‘this object must be effected by means of the English language
in the higher branches of instruction, and by that of the vernacular languages of
India to the great mass of the people.’18 The logical outcome of Wood’s
Despatch was the establishment of the three first Indian universities—those of
Calcutta, Bombay and Madras—in 1857. These universities soon became the
nurseries of the resurgent Indian genius, which within hardly a generation
thereafter ushered in a renaissance in the political, social, cultural and literary
spheres of Indian life.
Early Prose
More than two decades prior to Macaulay’s Minute of 1835, Indians had already
started writing in English. Cavelly Venkata Boriah’s ‘Account of the Jains’
published in Asiatic Researches or Transactions of the Society instituted in
Bengal for inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Art, Sciences and
Literature of Asia, Vol. IX (London, 1809, written in c. 1803) is perhaps the first
published composition in English of some length by an Indian. Boriah (1776-
1803), an assistant to Col. Colin Mackenzie (1753-1821)—the first Surveyor
General of India and well- known in South Indian history for the collection,
Mackenzie Manuscripts—was described by Mackenzie as ‘a youth of the
quickest genius and disposition.’1* A master of a number of languages including
Sanskrit, Persian, Hindustani and English, he studied mathematics, astronomy
and geography; wrote poetry in Telugu; discovered ancient coins and deciphered
old inscriptions. His ‘Account of the Jains’ has been described in the essay itself
as ‘collected from a priest of this sect at Mudgeri’ and ‘translated by C. Boria’
[n'c] This essay of twenty-eight pages is not therefore an original composition,
though it remains of historical importance as probably the first considerable
attempt by an Indian to write in English. Raja Rammohun Roy’s essay on ‘A
Defence of Hindu Theism’ (1817) may be regarded as the first original
publication of significance in the history of Indian English literature. Raja
Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), aptly described by Rabindranath Tagore as ‘the
inaugurator of the modern age in India’20 was indeed the morning star of the
Indian renaissance. The casual Western reader of today who perhaps remembers
him best as the original of the absurd Rummon Loll in Thackeray’sNewcomes,
certainly does him less than justice. A pioneer in religious, educational, social
and political reform, he was a man cast in the mould of the Humanists of the
European Renaissance. Born at Radhanagar in the Hooghley district (which was
also to produce Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Aurobindo) of Bengal in 1772,
Rammohun was the son of a rich landlord. Going to Patna at the age of nine to
study Arabic and Persian, he steeped himself in Muslim theology, Islamic
culture and Persian poetry there. Under the influence of the doctrines of the
Mutazalis school, he developed a rationalistic approach to religion, which he lost
no time in applying to Hinduism. Expelled from his father’s house for his
iconoclasm at the age of sixteen, he travelled far and wide and is supposed to
have lived in Tibet for sometime to study Buddhism there. This was followed by
a sojourn at Benaras, where he mastered orthodox Hindu theology and
philosophy. Restored to his father’s favour in 1794, he returned home and joined
the East India Company service in 1804. Resigning his post in 1811, he settled
down in Calcutta in 1814 and till the end of his life carried on a crusade for
social, cultural, religious and political reform. Plunging into journalism, he
edited periodicals in three languages-The Brahummunical Magazine in English
(1821-23), SambSd Kaumudi in Bengali (1821) and Mirat-ul-Akhbar in Persian
(1822-23). In 1828, he founded the Brahmo Sabha or Samaj, which was the
earliest attempt of its kind in the nineteenth century to revitalize Hinduism.
Sailing for Britain in 1830 as the envoy of the Mughal emperor who conferred
on him the title ‘Raja’, he continued his mission there until his death at Bristol in
1833.

Proficient in about half a dozen oriental and an equal number of occidental

languages, Rammohun Roy wrote extensively in Bengali, Persian, Hindi,
Sanskrit and English. [His collected writings—The English Works of Raja
Rammohun Roy (6 vols., 1945-51) were edited by Kalidas Nag and Debajyoti
Burman. Selected Works of/Raja Rammohun Roy, issued by the Publications
Division of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India,
appeared in 1977]. Of his English works, as many as thirty-two are original
essays on various subjects. The earliest of his writings on religion were in the
form of translations: ‘An Abridgement of the Vedant’ (1816) and renderings of
the Kena and Isa Upanishads (1816). An attack on the ‘Abridgement of the
Vedant’ by one Sankara Sastri prompted Rammohun Roy to write his first
original essay in English: ‘A Defence of Hindu Theism’ (1817)—a masterly
vindication of monotheism. This was followed by ‘A Second Defence of the
Monotheistical system of the Vedas in reply to an apology for the present state
of Hindoo Worship’ (1817).21 Next, embarking upon the study of Christian
theology, he read the scriptures in Hebrew, Greek and Latin and compiled
‘Precepts of Jesus: Tlie Guide to Peace and Happiness, Extracted from the
Books of the New Testament ascribed to the Four Evangelists with translations
into Sungscrit [r/c] and Bengalee’ (1820). ‘The translations, however, if they
were ever issued, have never been traced. The probability is that they were never
issued.’22 Here, boldly ‘separating from the other matters contained in the New
Testament, the moral precepts found in that book’, Rammohun Roy tried to
place before his ‘fellow creatures the words of Christ’. When the book was
bitterly attacked as heretical by Christian missionaries, Rammohun Roy wrote in
succession three rejoinders: ‘An Appeal to the Christian Public, in Defence of
“The Precepts of Jesus” ’ (published under the pseudonym, ‘A Friend of Truth’)
(1820); ‘Second Appeal to the Christian Public, in Defence of “The Precepts of
Jesus” ’ (1821); and ‘Final Appeal to the Christian Public, in Defence of “The
Precepts of Jesus’ (1823). In these ‘Appeals’, Rammobun Roy reiterates the
necessity to reject Christian myth, miracle and dogma in favour of the actual
teachings of Christ; chastises the missionaries for the unChristian spirit shown
by them in the controversy, and emphasizes the need for a ‘religion destructive
of differences and dislike between man and man and conducive to the peace and
union of mankind. Dr. Lant Carpenter found the ‘Second Appeal* ‘distinguished
by the closeness of his (Rammohun Roy’s) reasoning, the extent and critical
accuracy of his scriptural knowledge, the comprehensiveness of his in
vestigations and the acuteness and skill with which he contro- vents the positions
of his opponents.’ This comment would fit the other two appeals equally well.

Social reform was equally dear to Rammohun Roy. Here, the plight of women in
orthodox Hindu society became his special concern. His broadsides against
widow-burning include: ‘A Conference between an Advocate for, and an
Opponent of, the Practice of burning Widows alive’(1818);‘A Second
Conference between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of, the Practice of
burning Widows alive’ (1820); ‘Abstract of the Arguments regarding the
burning of Widows Considered as a Religious Rite’(1830),‘Address to Lord
William Bentinck’ (1830); and ‘Anti-Suttee Petition to the House of Commons’
(1832). In his ‘Brief Remarks regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient
Rights of Females According to the Hindu Law of Inheritance’ (1822) he attacks
polygamy and shows how ancient Hindu laws have been misinterpreted to deny
women equal rights to inheritance. Rammohun Roy’s famous ‘Letter on English
Education’ (11 December 1823), which has already been mentioned, is a
document of so great importance that it could very well be called ‘the manifesto
of the Indian renaissance’.

The most significant of Rammohun Roy’s political writings are the two
‘Petitions Against the Press Regulations’ (1823) drafted by him and signed along
with him by his supporters. These petitions were occasioned by the passing of a
Government ordinance in March 1823 suppressing the freedom of the press,
known as ‘Adam’s gag’ after John Adam, the acting GovernorGeneral. In the
first petition, described by Miss Collet as ‘The Areopagitica of Indian
history’24, Rammohun Roy argues:

‘Every good Ruler, who is convinced of the imperfection of human nature, and
reverences the Eternal Governor of the world, must be conscious of the great
liability to error in managing the affairs of a vast empire; and therefore he will
be anxious to afford to every individual the readiest means of bringing to his
notice whatever may require his interference. To secure this important object,
the unrestrained liberty of publication is the only effectual means that can be
employed.’21

When the petition was rejected, and the Press Regulation Act was promulgated,
Rammohun Roy appealed to the King-in- Council. In the second petition, he tells
the King:

'If your Majesty’s faithful subjects could conceive for a moment that the British
nation, actuated solely by interested policy, considered India merely as a
valuable property and nothing but the best means of securing its possession and
turning it to advantage, even then it would be of importance to ascertain whether
this property be well taken care of by their servants. . .therefore the existence of
a free Press is equally necessary for the sake of the Governors and the
governed.’

Rammohun Roy’s ‘Exposition of the Practical Operation of the Judicial and

Revenue Systems of India’ (1832) represents the evidence given by him before a
Parliamentary Select Committee in London in 1831. This document, which
embodies Rammohun Roy’s views on administrative reform, is specially
remarkable for its spirited protest against the economic drain in India under the
East India Company rule and the exploitation of the peasantry by the rich
landlords.

During the last year of his life, Rammohun Roy wrote a short autobiographical
sketch at the request of his friends. (Its authenticity has been questioned, but not
conclusively.) This sketch, though all too brief and written in a somewhat
matter- of-fact manner, is of interest as the first exercise in Indian English
literature in a form which was to be handled with conspicuous success by later
writers like Nehru and Nirad C. Chaudhuri.

Rammohun Roy’s writings obviously belong to the category of ‘Literature of

Knowledge’, rather than ‘Literature of Power’, yet, he is a master of a
distinguished English prose style. In a personal letter, Jeremy Bentham
complimented Rammohun Roy on ‘a style, which but for the name of a Hindoo,
I should certainly have ascribed to the pen of a superiorly educated and
instructed Englishman.’27 In the same letter, praising James Mill’s History of
India, Bentham added, ‘though as to style, I wish I could with truth and sincerity
pronounce it equal to yours.’28 Rammohun Roy’s style is reminiscent of Burke's
eloquence, though it does not possess the English master’s colour and splendour.
Nevertheless, clear thinking, soundness of judgement, comprehensiveness of
views, forceful and logical argumentation and moderation and dignity in refuting
the criticism of his adversaries are the outstanding features of Rammohun Roy's
prose style, which indubitably makes him the first of a long line of Indian
masters of English prose. The father of Bengali prosewriting, he is also the first
‘begetter’ of Indian prose in English.

Apart from Rammohun Roy’s work there was not a little prose writing of note
during mid and later nineteenth century in metropolitan centres like Calcutta,
Bombay and Madras. Most of this writing was on religious, social, historical and
political subjects and some of it in the form of journalism and pamphleteering.

In Bengal, Krishna Mohan Banerji (1813-85), a pupil of Henry Derozio, the

poet, and one of the prominent Christian converts of the day, wrote strong
articles exposing the errors and inconsistencies of Hinduism in the Enquirer in
1831. His Dialogues on Hindu Philosophy (1861) is a potted handbook for
missionaries and his Aryan Witness (1875) seeks to prove that the Prajapati of
the Vedas is Jesus Christ. Another pupil of Derozio, Ram Gopal Ghose (1815-
68) was actively associated with many literary, cultural and political
organizations in Calcutta. Connected with journals such as Agyananashun,
Durpan and The Spectator, he was an enthusiastic pamphleteer and a forceful
speaker, eulogised as the ‘Indian Demosthenes’. His pamphlet, ‘Remarks on the
Black Acts’ (1851) in defence of the so-called ‘Black Acts’ of 1849, which
abolished some of the privileges of Europeans in India, caused a furore in that
community. The Times described his speech on the Charter Act as 'a masterpiece
of oratory’ and his oration on the Queen’s Proclamation made the Indian Field
comment that ‘If he were an Englishman, he would have been knighted’.2His
Speeches were published in 1868. Hurish Chunder Mukerji (1824-60) edited The
Hindoo Patriot from 1854 to 1860 with a passionate tense of mission,
championing widow-remarriage, counselling reconciliation after the Mutiny and
exposing the iniquities of the British planters. Rajendra Lal Mitra (1824-91),
Assistant Secretary and Librarian, Bengal Asiatic Society, and hailed by Tagore
as ‘Sabyasachi’ (i.e., ambidextrous) was one of the earliest Indian antiquarians,
Indologists and historians. His numerous studies, including Antiquities of Orissa
(1875, 1880) and Buddha Gaya (1878) earned him Max Muller’s praise in Chips
from a German Workshop. His Speeches, edited by R.J. Mitter, appeared in
1892. Girish Chunder Ghosh (1829-69) founded in 1849 The Bengal Recorder
Weekly, which became The HindooPatriot in 1853. He also founded and edited
The Bengalee (1861- 68)

and fearlessly advocated social and political reform. His vigorous pleading in
The Bengalee led to the appointment of the Famine Commission in 1866.
Selections from the Writings of Girish Chunder Ghosh, edited by his grandson,
Manmath Nath Ghose, appeared in 1912. Raja Ram’s Essays on the Architecture
of the Hindus (Calcutta, 1834), is perhaps the earliest attempt at art criticism.

The first name that comes to mind when one turns from Bengal to Bombay is
that of Bal Shastri Jambhekar (1812-46), a great pioneer of the new awakening
in the Bombay presidency. Perhaps the first Sanskrit pundit of note to study
English, he became the teacher of such men as Dadabhai Naoroji, Bhau Daji,
and K.L. Chattre. Linguist, educationist, translator, antiquarian (he contributed
frequently to the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society), Jambhekar is best
remembered as the founder of the first English-cum-Marathi journal in
Maharashtra, The Durpan (1832), the aim of which as described in its Prospectus
was, ‘to encourage among their countrymen the pursuit of English literature and
to open a field for free and public discussion. The journal sought to ‘please, to
convey information on passing events, and to point out the means and
opportunities for improvements.’ His contemporary, Dadoba Pandurang
(Tarkhadkar) (1814-82), scholar, educationist, religious and social reformer, and
author of the earliest standard Marathi Grammar, wrote ‘A Hindu Gentleman’s
Reflections respecting the works of Emanuel Swedenborg (1878) —an
enlightened study in comparative religious thought. Bhau Daji (1822-74), a
physician by profession, was active in many causes. A founder secretary of the
Bombay Association, he became the first sheriff of Bombay. Apart from
conducting investigations in Indian medicine, he wrote numerous articles on
antiquarian research and social and political problems. His ‘Essay, on
Infanticide’ appeared in 1847. His Writings and Speeches (1974) have recently
been edited by T.G. Mainkar.

In the Madras presidency, apart from Boriah’s ‘Account of the Jains', another
noteworthy early document is Vannelakanti Soobrow’s (He was, significantly
enough, known as ‘English Soobrow’) report on the ‘State of Education in
1820,’30 submitted to the Madras School Book Society of which he was a
nominated member. Written on 22 November,, 1820, it was published in theFirst
Report of the Madras School Book Society for the year 1823. Soobrow’s report
contains interesting bits of information such as that The Arabian Nights was one
of the prescribed school texts then and that ‘Among the Natives, English school
masters at Madras, there are. . .very few who-have a knowledge of grammar.’ In
1844, Gazulu Lakshmi Narsu Chetty (1806-68), a public-spirited businessman
and founder of the Madras Native Association, started The Crescent—a
newspaper dedicated to ‘the amelioration of the condition of the Hindoos.”1 He
was also instrumental in drawing up several memorials and petitions to the
Government on issues such as the grievances of the people and the need for
transferring the administration of India from The Company to the Crown. The
Madras presidency also enjoys the distinction of having produced the first work
of literary biography in Indian English literature. This was Cavelly Venkanta
Ramaswami’s Biographical Sketches of the Dekkan [sic] PoetsSketches of the
Dekkan [sic] Poets 1840), the elder brother of C.V. Boriah (the author of the
'Account of the Jains’) describes in this book the lives of more than a hundred
Indian poets, both ancient and modern, in Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil and Marathi.
The accounts vary in length and accuracy and are written in a rather pedestrian
style, there being no attempt at critical comment on the poetry. But to have
written in English a work of this nature and with this scope in early Nineteenth
century India is itself no mean a feat.

In contrast with the Bengal, Bombay and Madras presidencies, the north India of
the period shows little sustained interest in Indian English writing, but as if to
compensate for this, it can boast of having produced the first extensive Indian
English autobiography (Rammohun Roy’s autobiographical sketch is an all too
brief affair): Autobiography of Lutufullah: A Mohamedan Gentleman and His
Transactions with his fellow creatures: Interspersed with remarks on the habits,
customs and character of the people with whom he had to deal (1857). The son
of a Muslim priest, Lutufullah (b. 1802) served in the states of Baroda and
Gwalior, and later, having learnt English, became a tutor in Persian, Arabic and
Hindustani to British officers. He travelled widely over India and also visited
England. Part travel diary and part autobiography, Lutufullah’s book is the
expression of a man who wps well read (he quotes from Shakespeare, Bacon,
Prior and Rowe), enterprising, observant and broad-minded. His boldness of
judgment is revealed in his description of the character of the English. Though
he admires their civility, respect for law and spirit of patriotism, he is highly
critical of what he calls their 'obedience, trust and submission to the female sex’
which, according to him, 'are far beyond the limit of moderation.’
Early Poetry
Cavelly Venkata Ramaswami’s English rendering of 'Viswa- gunadarsana’ of
Arasanipala Venkatadhvarin, an early seventeenth-century Sanskrit poem, is
probably the earliest (1825) book of verse in English by an Indian, though being
a translation (and not an original work) it cannot properly form part of Indian
English literature. An interesting point about the book is that it was published
inCalcutta, with the help of donations, and the list of donors given on the last
page includes the names of Rammohun Roy and Dwaraknath Tagore.32In his
Viographical Sketches of Dekkart Poets, Ramaswami also gives a competent
translation in heroic couplets of passages from Vasu Charitra, a Telugu epic by
the sixteenth-century poet, Bhattu Murti.

The first Indian English poet of note, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-31)
was the son of an Indo-Portuguese father and an English mother. A precocious
child, he had already taken to writing in his teens. After completing his school
education, he worked for sometime as a clerk in Calcutta and on an indigo
plantation at Bhagalpur, and also tried his hand at journalism before joining the
Hindu College, Calcutta, as a lecturer. Here, his fearless spirit of inquiry, his
passion for ideas, his reformis- tic idealism and his romantic enthusiasm fired
the imagination of many a student. Under his leadership, a debating club (‘The
Academic Association’) and a magazine (The Parthenon) were started to discuss
all subjects under the sun, including Hindu religious practices, the rights of
women and political issues. Orthodox Hindu society in Calcutta was seriously
alarmed at these activities which wild rumour painted in the darkest colours. For
instance, Derozio and his pupils were accused of ‘cutting their way through ham
and beef and wading to liberation through tumblers of beer.’33 It was also said
that ‘some Hindu boys, when required to utter mantras at prayers, would repeat
lines from the Iliad instead (and) that one student, asked to bow down before the
goddess Kali, greeted the image with a “good morning, Madam.”34The
mounting pressure of hostile public opinion finally compelled the College
authorities to dismiss Derozio from service in 1831 on the charge of corrupting
the minds of youth. Undaunted, he started a daily,The East InAian, but suddenly
died of cholera six months later.

In his all too brief poetic career lasting hardly half a dozen years, Derozio
published two volumes of poetry: Poems (1827) and The Fakeer of Jungheera: A
Metrical Tale and Other Poems (1828). The shorter poems show a strong
influence of British romantic poets in theme (e.g. ‘Sonnet: To the Moon’; ‘The
Golden Vase’; ‘Sonnet: Death, my Best Friend’), sentiment, imagery and
diction, with some traces of neo-classicism (e.g.)

The heart.. .where hope eternal springs’, with its obvious echo of Pope). His
satirical verse (e g. 'Don Juanics’) and the long narrative poems (The Fakeer of
Jungheera) clearly indicate his special affinity with Byron. In sharp contrast to
the wilting sentimentality of his romantic lyrics, Derozio’s satirical verses give
evidence of energy and vigour, as in the lines: ‘That sponging is the best of all
resources/For all who have no money in their purses.’ The Fakeer of Jungheera
is an extremely competent narrative of the tragic life of Nuleeni, a high-caste
Hindu widow, rescued from the funeral pyre by a young robber-chief, whose
love she returns. Her relatives, however, are determined to reclaim her. In the
ensuing battle, the lover is killed and is finally united in death with the heart-
broken Nuleeni. In this fast-moving tale, Derozio skilfully employs different
metres to suit the changing tone and temper of the narrative. He uses the iambic
four-foot couplet for straight-forward narration, but adopts a slower line for the
descriptive passages and the anapaestic metre for the spirited account of the
battle, while the choruses of the chanting priests and the women round Nuleeni’s
funeral pyre are in trochaic and dactylic measures.

A noteworthy feature of Derozio’s poetry is its burning nationalistic zeal,

somewhat surprising in a Eurasian at a time when the average representative of
his class was prone to repudiate his Indian blood and identify himself with the
white man, for eminently practical reasons. Poems like 'To India—My Native
Land’, ‘The Harp of India’, and ‘To the Pupils of Hindu College’ have an
unmistakable authenticity of patriotic utterance which stamps Derozio as an
Indian English poet who is truly a son of the soil. Derozio is also a pioneer in the
use of Indian myth and legend, imagery and diction (though he also employs
allusions to Western classical myths with equal competence): e.g. ‘Highest
Himalay’ (‘Poetry’); ‘Gunga’s roil’ (‘Song of the Indian Girl’); ‘Chandra’s
beams’ (‘The Eclipse’), ‘Sweet Sitar’ ('Song of the Hindoostani Minstrel’) etc.
Unlike Sarojini Naidu, Derozio is able to strike the singing note only
occasionally, and his most successful poems are the sonnets in which the
imperatives of the form save authentic emotion from slipping easily into soft
sentimentality. It is obviously impossible to accept today E.F. Oaten’s over-
generous assessment of Derozio as ‘the National bard of modern India.’36 A
poet of slender actual achievement, Derozio, ‘a lamp too early quenched’
remains a writer of sadly unfulfilled promise.
Three years after Derozio signalled the birth of Indian English poetry, the first
volume of verse by an author of pure Indian blood appeared: The Shair or
Minstrel and other Poems (1830) by Kashiprasad Ghose (1809-73). Fired, at a
young age, with the ambition to compose original verse in English, Kashiprasad
Ghose studied prosody and criticism on the advice of his British teacher in the
College. As he says, he also ‘continued reading the best poetry in a regular and
measured tone which soon accustomed my ear to English rhythm.’ The results,
as revealed in his work are generally correct verses, undistinguished either by
authentic emotion or poetic imagination. Kashiprasad Ghose seems to intimate
by turns the stylized love-lyrics of the Cavalier poets, the moralizing note in
neoclassical poetry and the British romantics, his ‘Shair’ being obviously Scott's
‘minstrel’ in an Indian garb, slightly dishevelled as a result of the arduous
voyage across the seas. His use of Indian material in his poems about the Hindu
festivals and in lyrics like ‘The Boatman’s Song to Ganga’ indicates an honest
attempt to strike a native wood-note which fails not because earnestness of
purpose is wanting but owing to sheer lack of true poetic talent.

Equally undistinguished are Rajnarain Dutt’s (1824-89) verse narrative, Osmyn:

An Arabian Tale (1841) in faded heroic couplets; Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s
(1815-65) Miscellaneous Poems (1848) and Hur Chunder Dutt’s (1831-1901)
Fugitive Pieces(1851). A better title to fame the last two Dutts possess is that
they were the uncles of a girl who was to write Ancient Ballads and Legends of
Hindustan a generation later.

Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-73), better known as an epoch-making writer

in Bengali, began his career as an Indian English poet. In addition to some
sonnets and shorter pieces, he wrote two long poems in English; The Captive
Ladie (1849) narrates the story of the Rajput King, Prithviraj, his Lochinvarlike
abduction of the Kanouj King’s daughter, and his unsuccessful battle with the
Muslim invader, ending in his own death tnd that of his queen. Dutt takes
liberties with history, by making Prithviraj and his queen kill themselves by
mounting a funeral pyre at the end, while in actual fact, the Hindu king was
captured and put to death by his Muslim conqueror. But, in contrast to his
history, his prosody is pure, and his octosyllabics move with almost as much
vigour and energy as in his models—viz., Scott and Byron. In fact, The
Athenaeum declared that the poem ‘contained passages which neither Scott nor
Byron would have been ashamed to own."’ In Visions of the Past (1849), a poem
in Miltonic blank verse, complete with weighty, abstract diction and Latin
inversions, Dutt handles the Christian theme of the temptation and fall and
redemption of Man. The result is a skilled pastiche of Milton. In spite of his
command of English and his sense of rhythm, Dutt’s English poetry hardly rises
above the level of derivative, if technically accomplished, verse. He was really
able to spread his wings only when he turned to Bengali for artistic expression,
following Drinkwater Bethune’s advice that ‘he could render a far greater
service to his country and have a better chance of achieving a lasting reputation
for himself if he would employ the taste and talents which he has cultivated by
the study of English in improving the standard and adding to the stock of the
poems of his own language.’

The first period of Indian English literature may be said to end in the 1850s, a
few years before the Indian Revolt of 1857 —that great watershed in the
relationship between India and Britain. During this period British rule in India
was generally accepted by most Indians as a great boon divinely delivered. The
holocaust of the Revolt ushered in different ideas. Winds of change soon began
to blow over the land, affecting accepted attitudes. It was ultimately as a
combined result of these changes that Indian English literature slowly struggled
during the next two generations from psittacism to authentic artistic utterance.
CHAPTER 3: The Winds of Change:
1857 to 1920
With the end of the Great Revolt and the proclamation of peace on 8 July 1858
came the end of the East India Company rule also, though the Company itself
lingered on for a few years more, until its formal dissolution on 1 January 1874.
The Queen’s proclamation of 1 November 1858 heralded the birth of a new age.
The Revolt and its aftermath led to several radical changes in the Indo-British
relationship. Unfortunately, they were all in the direction of widening the
cleavage between the two peoples.

In fact, this process had already set in during the forties; the Revolt and its
repercussions only served to accelerate it. In the early days of the Company
dispensation, many of its servants came to India as ‘writers’ at a young age,
filled with a- spirit of youthful adventure and curiosity and fascinated by the
land of opportunity in which they found themselves. The story told of John
Malcolm’s interview for cadetship is not unrepresentative. Asked ‘What would
you do if you met Tipu Sultan?’ the young laddie promptly answered in broad
Scots, ‘I would cut off his head.’1 Furthermore, unaffected by colour prejudice
and unspoiled by imperialistic hauteur (though these attitudes were certainly not
totally absent from the scene), some of them saw nothing wrong in taking Ipdian
mistresses—and, a few, even wives. ‘Going native' had not yet become the
capital crime it was to be after 1857. Col. Kilpatrick, British Resident of
Hyderabad, was said to have dyed his beard with henna, married a Muslim lady
and dressed like a Muslim nobleman; and Col. Charles Stewart came to be
known as ‘Hindoo Stewart’ on account of his passion for Hindu culture.*
Actually, in the early days, the company 'patronized both Hindu and Muslim
religions. Offices were open on Sunday but closed on Indian Holidays. Troops
were paraded in honour of Hindu deities. .. British officials assisted in the
management of Hindu religious trusts.’3 Out of this kind of a spirit of
identification—though not always expressed in such extreme ways-had come the
loving discovery of ancient Indian culture by the British officials of the early
days.

The Evangelical revival in England, the social and educational reforms of the
1830s, the advent of the steamships during the 1840s, and the changes made in
the system of recruitment to Company service in the 1850s ushered in totally
changed attitudes. From 1853, admissions to the Company’s training college at
Haileybury began to be made by competitive examinations. This brought to
India a different race of civil servants, ending the tradition of hereditary service
by which sons of certain families like the Prinseps and the Bechers had served
India generation after generation. W.S. Blunt declared in 1909, ‘The Anglo-
Indian official of the Company’s days loved India in a way no Queen’s official
dreams of doing now.. .Also. .. loving it, he served it better than now, and was
better loved in return.’4 The impact of the Evangelical revival and its after- math
often generated a feeling of contempt for Hindu religion and culture in the
Englishman’s mind; and the stance of the white man’s superiority came naturally
to self-made men, the products of the new social and educational reforms.
Again, with the introduction of steam-navigation, an Englishman could reach
Bombay from London within thirty days, this period being reduced still further
with the opening of the Suez canal in 1869. This meant that there was no need
henceforth for the British officials to make India their home. It was very much
easier now for their wives and families to come to India. The small British
colony—a tiny white oasis in the brown desert around —now appeared on the
social scene. As W.S. Blunt noted in 1909, ‘The Englishwoman in India during
the last thirty years has been the cause of half the bitter feelings there between
race and race... It is her constantly increasing influence now that widens the gulf
of ill-feeling and makes amalgamation daily more impossible.’11 As a total
result of these various factors, for the new British civil servant, India came to be
mostly exile and not home, a ‘land of regrets’ in Sir Alfred LyalPs phrase.

The many horrors of 1857-58 and the cruelties perpetrated by both the sides
during the Revolt left inveterate scars which were never to heal completely. As
G.T. Garrat pointedly put fifty years ago, ‘The English have never attempted to
remove the irritation caused by their behaviour after the Mutiny, and from that
time we must date the long and bitter estrangement between the two races. Born
of hatre ’ and fear, it was nourished on a series of unfortunate incidents most of
which were the direct result of the new spirit which the Mutiny encouraged
amongst Europeans.’7 Garrat adds, ‘Countless middle-class Englishmen learnt to
look upon Indians as the creatures, half gorilla, half Negro, who appeared in the
contemporary Punch cartoons. They were usually depicted standing over a
murdered woman but cowering before an avenging Britannia. . .praying to the
God of Battles to steel our soldiers’ hearts. For another generation their children
learnt of India from the same source.’8 As late as the turn of -the century, we
find a British official in India describing his situation thus: ‘Here we stand on the
face of the broad earth, a scanty, pale-faced band in the midst of 300 millions of
unfriendly vassals.’8 And this kind of an official had become, in the words of
Blunt, ‘the practical owner of India.. . irremovable, irresponsible and amenable
to no authority but that of his fellow-members.’10 The alienation of the British
official from those he governed now became, with extremely few exceptions,
virtually total.

If the British attitude to the Indian thus underwent a radical transformation, the
Indian too was changing, and changing very fast. When the first products of
higher education in India started coming out of the portals of the earliest Indian
universities (established ironically enough in the year of the Revolt itself), the
seeds of the ideas sown by Raja Rammohun Roy a generation earlier began to
sprout vigorously. The gradual spread of the vast railway network, the growth of
the native press in the bigger cities and the acquisition of a common language—
viz., English—soon brought the new Indian intelligentsia close together. While
the old Indian aristocracy lay supine, licking its wounds, dreaming of past
splendours and shutting its eyes to the realities of the present, there ‘was born
from the middle stratum of society a new integrated all-India class with varied
background but a common foreground of knowledge, ideas and values. .. It was
a dynamic minority; It had a sense of unity, of purpose, and of hope. It was the
newborn soul of modern India. In time it was to infuse the whole of India with
its spirit.’

This spirit soon began io express itself through movements of religious, social
and political reform. As already noted, a beginning in this direction had been-
made by Raja Rammohun Roy as early as 1828, when be founded the Brahmo
Samaj, an attempt to reorganize Hinduism along the lines of monotheism and
repudiation of idol-worship and superstition. After Rammohun Roy’s death, the
movement was strengthened by Dwaraknath Tagore. With Keshub Chunder Sen
(1838-84), came a period of expansion, when the movement assumed an all-
India character, leading to the establishment of similar organizations like the
Prarthana Samaj by M.G. Ranade and R.G. Bhandarkar in Bombay in 1867. In
spite of a schism in the Brahmo Samaj in 1866, brought about by the growing
differences between the conservatives and the reformers, the movement
continued to be vigorous, especially in Bengal, and influenced, in some measure,
the thought of men like Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore.

A similar movement was Arya Samaj, established in 1875 by Swami Dayanand

Saraswati (1824-83). This was an attempt to revive Hinduism in the pristine
purity of the Vedic age. Repudiation of Puranism and polytheism, rejection of
the hereditary caste system and revival of proselytization were its chief
doctrines. The Arya Samaj, which also started a number of educational
institutions imparting both oriental and occidental knowledge, later continued its
mission of militant Vedic Hinduism with renewed vigour under the leadership of
Swami Shrad- dhanand and Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928)

The year which marked the establishment of the Arya Samaj also saw the rise of
another movement based on ancient Hindu religious and philosophical thought.
This was the Theosophical Society founded in New York by Madame H.P.
Blavatsky, Col. H.S. Olcott, W.O. Judge and others. Unlike the Arya Samaj this
was a western movement but the society shifted to Adyar in India in 1878. With
its blend of the teachings of Hinduism, Buddhism, Pythagoras and Plato, ancient
Egyptian thought and early Christianity, Theosophy was an eclectic creed, but
like the Arya Samaj it also helped the prevailing climate of the Indian
resurgence.

While all these movements aiming at religious reform flour - ished, the
appearance of a genuine Hindu saint and mystic at this juncture showed how the
ancient Hindu tradition, far from being fossilized, was still vigorous enough to
produce new living manifestations. Swami Ramakrishna (1836-86), who made
his entire life an ecstatic pilgrimage of spirituality, cast a spell on the youth of
modern Bengal. During the last year of his life, his disciples, led by Swami
Vivekananda, formed a holy brother-hood which finally took shape as the well-
known Ramakrishna Mission. Under the dynamic leadership of Swami
Vivekananda, the Mission effectively carried the message of ancient Hinduism
abrood, while in India itself, Vivekananda's fiery eloquence, having dazzled the
West, instilled a new self-confidence in the minds of his compatriots.

This was one of the signal gains of the new religious resurgence. Earlier, under
the first impact of Western education, the Indian, swept off his feet by European
culture and thought, had often been a prey to an inferiority feeling, as he
contemplated, in comparison, the state of his own tradition-bound religion and
culture. In Bengal especially, the younger generation had, for a time, taken pride
in rebelling against what it considered to be crass obscurantism; and some like
M.M. Dutt had even abjured Hinduism to embrace Christianity. As Surendranath
Banerjea observes, ‘Our fathers, the first fruits of English education, were
violently pro-British. They saw no flaw in the civilization and the culture of the
West. They were charmed by its novelty and its strangeness. The
enfranchisement of the individual, the substitution of the right of private
judgment in place of traditional authority, the exaltation of duty over custom—
all came with the force and suddenness of a revelation to an oriental people who
knew no more binding obligation than the mandate of immemorial usage and of
venerable tradition.’12 The new reform movements proved a strong corrective
and restored the balance.

The general climate of resurgence in the country did not fail to affect the Muslim
community also, though here orthodoxy was even more firmly entrenched. Syed
Ahmed Khan (1817-98) became to the Muslims what Rammohun Roy was to the
Hindus earlier. Making the dissemination of western ideas and education among
the Muslims the sole mission of his life, he founded the Anglo-Arabic College at
Aligarh (1873), which later developed into the Aligarh Muslim University. In
course of time, this institution became the most important centre of Islamic
thought in India. As a friend of Syed Abmed Khan has observed, ‘other men
have written books and founded colleges; but to arrest, as with a wall, the
degeneration of a whole people, that is the work of a prophet.’

Even before the inception of the college of Aligarh, the Mohammedan Literary
and Scientific Society of Calcutta had been founded by Abdul Latif in 1863. In
1878, Ameer Ali started the National Mohammedan Association, the policy of
which was loyalty to the crown and assimilation of the progressive tendencies of
the age. By 1888, the Association had more than fifty branches, mostly in the
northern and eastern regions of India.

The new reformists zeal was inevitably accompanied by a political awakening as

well. The first organized effort in this direction was the founding of the British
India Association in 1839, to be followed quickly by the Bengal British India
Society in 1843 and the British Indian Association of Calcutta in 1831. In 1876,
Surendranath Banerjea founded the Indian Association, which was intended to
be the centre of an AII-India movement based on ‘the conception of a united
India, derived from the inspiration of Mazzini.’ Soon, agitations against the
lowering of the age limit for Civil Service examinations, the Arms Act, the
Vernacular Press Act and the Ilbert Bill accelerated the tempo or Indian political
activity. In 1885, the Indian National Congress was established, with the support
of liberal-minded Englishmen like A.O. Hume, Sir William Wedderburn and Sir
David Yule. In the beginning it was mostly a body of moderates who had
unshakable faith in the British sense of justice and fair play, and who pledged
complete loyalty to the King Emperor. It passed courteously worded resolutions
requesting the Government for political and social reform. Most British
administrators refused to take it seriously. (Lord Dufferin’s dismissal of it as
‘Babu Parliament supported by a microcosmic minority’ and ‘hysterical
assembly in which the more violent and silly of their members rule the roost,’ is
characteristic.) Continued Government indifference and mounting Indian
impatience fanned by the rise of radicals like B.G. Tilak and Aurobindo Ghose
led to the eclipse of the moderates and the Congress increasingly became a more
militant body. The coup de grace was administered by the ill-advised partition of
Bengal in 1905 by Lord Curzon (that ‘most superior person’) whose boundless
egotism made him so blind to the political realities of his time that we find him
prophesying as late as 1909 that the Congress was ‘tottering to its fall’ and that
one of his great ambitions while in India was ‘to assist it to a peaceful
demise.’1To Indians the partition appeared to be not so much an administrative
necessity as a planned attempt to weaken the nationalistic movement. A popular
agitation set in, which, ‘starting as a purely local movement, led to and merged
itself in a national struggle of All India character against the British, which never
ceased till India won her independence.’

The increasing self-confidence generated by the re-discovery of the Indian

identity received a further boost with Japan’s epoch-making victory over Russia
in 1905, which pricked the bubble of Western superiority. As Lord Curzon
himself put it, ‘The reverberations of that victory have gone like a thunderclap
through the whispering galleries of the East.’18 Again, the revolutionary
movements in China and Turkey in the first decade of the twentieth century and
the Persian liberal movement 'all suggested that the path of progress consisted in
using western techniques and ideas to regenerate ancient societies and then to
use western weapons against western supremacy. The belief in an irresistible
West from which nothing but pure imitation could procure even a modicum of
self-respect was broken. India and the East might look forward to independent
life again.’

This conviction was strengthened by the impact of World War I and its
aftermath. As Percival Spear points out, ‘American democracy emerged as a
force which might counter the old Western imperialism. President Wilson’s1
Fourteen Points and his doctrine of self-determination shot a thrill of expectancy
through Asia. . . .The American influence changed the emphasis of political
discussion from constitutionalism and legal rights to the abstract rights of man.
A more radical tone came into political discussion which, if it sometimes led to
dangerous unreality, increased the self-confidence and determination of the new
popular leaders. As Europe was seen to be no longer invincible, Britain was
realized to be less powerful in the European system than had previously been
thought. This new evaluation of Britain and the West encouraged the organizers
of anti-government movements.’20

Thus, during the period from 1857 to 1920, the Indian ethos gradually underwent
a sea-change from the shock of defeat and frustration and the trauma of
inferiority feeling to a new-found self-awareness and self-confidence. It is
against this background that the work of the prominent writers of this period
must be viewed; and it now becomes clear why the diffident psittacism of
Kashiprasad Ghose should now make room for the confident authenticity of
Toru Dutt, Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore; and also why, while we
have only a solitary Rammohun Roy—a genius well ahead of his times—before
1857, the next sixty years produced a Ranade and a Gokhale, a Tilak and a
Vivekananda. Indian English literature really came of age after 1857, when
India’s rediscovery of her identity became a vigorous, allabsorbing quest and
when she had learnt enough from the West to progress from imitation and
assimilation to creation.
Poetry
This change, of course, came gradually and there is no trace of it in the first
notable work of poetry in this period—The Dutt Family Album (1870), though it
appeared more than twenty years after M.M. Dutt's Visions of the Past; but
significantly enough, Toru Dutt's work lay only half a dozen years ahead. The
Dutt Family Album, the only instance of a family anthology in Indian English
poetry, is a collection of 187 poems by three Dutt brothers—Govin Chunder,
Hur Chunder and Greece [sic] Chunder, and their cousin, Omesh Chunder. The
Dutts, descendants of Rasmoy Dutt, who had been a lieutenant of Rammohun
Roy, had abjured Hinduism in favour of Christianity and Govin Chunder, who
had visited England with his family, had once even thought of settling down
there. These poets can hardly therefore be expected to write with India in their
bones; they treat their Indian material as something poetically serviceable. Their
major subjects are Christian sentiment, Nature, and Indian history and legend
and like the poets of the earlier generation they are content to play the sedulous
ape to the British Romantics. When Govin Chunder, addressing the spirit of
Romance asks ‘Who hath not seen thee, fair one, when the day/ Urges his
coursers over the dappled clouds’ (‘A Farewell to Romance’), he is obviously
echoing Keats’s well-known apostrophe to Autumn. Similarly, in contemplating
a Himalayan peak, Greece Chundur Dutt can only repeat all the appropriate
Wordsworthian responses, including ‘peaceful thoughts and calm delight/And
soothing hopes and sadness mild’ (‘Sonnet: Like a great temple’). Omesh
Chunder Dutt, while recounting the exploits of a Rajput prince, visualizes him as
a medieval English knight equipped with a gerfalcon (a north European bird) and
attended by a squire (‘The Chief of Pokurna’). And Hur Chunder Dutt’s sonnet,
‘India’, sports all the correct sentiments—‘I love thee with a boundless
love/Land of my birth’, but provides little evidence of actual personal
involvement expressed in evocative terms. The Dutt Family Album, like the
poetry of Kashiprasad Ghose and M.M. Dutt earlier, again shows how mere
technical competence unattended by freshness and genuineness of response does
not make for authenticity in art.

neness of response does not make for authenticity in art. 1918), on the other
hand, there are certain glimpses of authenticity. In his verses are seen the first
tentative flickerings of the myitical flame which was to burn bright later in Sri
Aurobindo and Tagore. His works include Willow Drops (1873-74), The Last
Day: A Poem (1886) and Shiva Ratri, Bhagaboti Gita and Miscellaneous Poems
(1903). The Poetical Works edited by D.C. Mallick appeared in 1919. A
versatile poet, Ram Sharma wrote occasional verse (‘Ode in commemoration of
the visit of Prince Albert to India in 1875); satires (‘Lines Addressed to James
Skribblerus’); narratives (‘Mohinee’); lyrics on various themes and mystical
verse. As one who had practised yoga for forty years, he was certainly in a
position to recreate genuine mystic experience in poetic terms. Unfortunately,
the still uncxorcized demon of psittacism in him often compels him to express
his responses through conventional western myth and frame of reference, as
when he describes his Hindu yogic experience as ‘a very sabbath of the soul’
(‘Music and vision of the Anahat Chakram’), or in visualizing a meeting after
death between Swami Vivekananda and his master, he brings them toge ther in
Elysium (‘In Memory of Swami Vivekananda’).

It was with Toru Dutt (1856-77) that Indian English poetry really graduated from
imitation to authenticity. The third and youngest child of Govin Chunder Dutt,
Torulata, born a Hindu, was baptized along with the other members of the family
in 1862. She learnt English at a very early age and reading and music were her
chief hobbies. Sailing for Europe in 1869, she spent a year in France, studying
French, and was thereafter in England for three years. Returning to India in
1873, she died of consumption four years later, at the age of twentyone. One of
her father’s sonnets contains a remarkable pen-portrait of her: ‘Puny and elf-like,
with dishevelled tresses/Self-willed and shy. . . /Intent to pay her tenderest
addresses/ To bird or cat,— but most intelligent.’The fifty odd letters'1 she wrote
to her English friend, Miss Martin, reveal an interesting personality. There is
inevitably much in them of the usual schoolgirl gossip about the trivial minutiae
of daily life—news of the calving of a cow and the killing of a large snake; and
at one place one finds her demanding a mosquito curtain for her canaries; but
there is something much more also: a sad awareness of the passing of time and
strange intimations of maturity, as, for instance, when she declares, ‘I am getting
quite old, twenty and some odd months and with such an old-fashioned face that
English ladies take me for thirty.’ For one living so sheltered a life, she shows a
surprisingly lively interest in the social and political scene. When a European
who had killed his syce is reported to have been fined only £2, she comments
indignantly, ‘You see how cheap the life of an Indian is in the eyes of an English
judge.’ Her comments on the books she reads show a well-developed critical
sense. She wonders why Hardy’s heroines ‘generally marry the men they loved
the least.’ An impish sense of humour too breaks out occasionally, as when, on
being chided by an elderly relative for not getting married yet, she replies
demurely, ‘I was only waiting for your permission.’
Her attitude to England is ambivalent. The burden of her letters is, ‘I wish I was
there,’ and ‘I so long to be there.’ She misses at home ‘the free life we led there.’
When she drives by the Calcutta harbour, the sight of the steamships fills her
with a sudden des're to jump aboard one of these ‘homeward bound’ steamers.
She even refers to her own countrymen (quite innocently though) as ‘natives’,
and apologizes when pulled up by her British correspondent. But as her study of
Sanskrit during the closing years of her life brought her nearer to the springs of
her own culture, she ceased to be a ‘Brown Englishwoman’. She now realizes
‘how grand, how sublime, how pathetic our legends are,’ and during the last few
months of her life she writes, ‘strange to say I do not much relish the idea of
leaving Calcutta. I am very fickle, for it was Iwho regretted the most leaving
England. I wonder why this is so.’

Toru Dutt’s tragedy is that she died just when her talent was maturing with her
discovery of her roots. Of her two collections, only one appeared in her own life
time and that was not in the nature of original work. A Sheaf Gleaned in French
Fields (1876) comprises 165 lyrics by about a hundred French poets, (iinstated
into English mostly by her, only eight of the pieces including the much-praised
‘Still barred thy door—the far east glows being by her sister Aru. Edmund
Gosse’s description of the volume as ‘a wonderful mixture of strength and
weakness’51 is a just evaluation. Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan
(1882) published posthumously shows how Keatsian in pace was the progress
achieved by Toru Dutt during the last two years of her life. Two of these ballads
deal with the archetypes of Indian womanhood, Sita and Savitri; four narrate the
legends of youngsters, Dhruva, Buttoo, Sindhu and Prehlad; one recounts a
legend about the goddess Uma; and Lakshman and king Bharata are the other
characters that figure here. As this list indicates, Toru Dutt is the first Indian
English poet to make an extensive use of Indian myth and legend, though
scattered references to these had been employed by her predecessors.
Furthermore, her treatment of these legends reveals, on the whole, an instinctive
understanding of the spirit underlying them, though as a recent Christian convert
living in a half- anglicized environment at home, she occasionally betrays certain
inadequacies. She sings of Savitri’s matchless wifely devotion, her faith in the
omnipotence of fate and her belief in Maya; Sunneetee’s enunciation of the
doctrine of Karma, and Prehlad’s pantheism with an insider’s sense of
conviction. At the same time, in ‘The Royal Ascetic and the Hind,’ she is
tempted, at the end, to read a Christian sermon on Divine Love to the reader,
thus missing the point of the original tale in theVishnu Parana, which seeks to
emphasize the need to concentrate all one’s thoughts not on a worldly being, but
on God, at the moment of death.

Toru Dutt’s poetic technique shows a sure grasp of mofe than one poetic mode.
‘Savitri’ reveals her skill in brisk narration; ‘Lakshman’ a keen sense of drama,
and the sonnet ‘Baug- maree’ —one of the seven ‘miscellaneous poems’
included in the collection—a flair for description. But it is again a mark of her
peculiar ambivalence that she misses altogether the dramatic irony inherent in
the finale of the story of Sindhu (better known as ‘Sravana’), where the prophecy
of the boy’s hapless parents that King Dasaratha too would die of grief at parting
from a child comes like a fortunate curse to the King who is childless. Her
imagery makes evocative use of local colour. The forest in which Buttoo
wanders is full of ‘the sombre soul’, ‘the bitter neem’ and ‘the seemul, gorgeous
as a bride’, though one wonders how the ‘Pampas’, more typical of South
America, have found their roots here. A jarring note is similarly struck when the
peacocks in Sindhu’s forest are endowed with ‘Argus wings’. But in describing
the Seemul’s red flowers she writes what is perhaps her most memorable line:
‘Red, red, and startling like a trumpet’s sound’—an image surprisingly modern
in its use of synaesthesia, a device used so effectively by Edith Sitwell.

Her diction is naturally of the Victorian romantic school, and true to the Ballad
motif, she employs archaisms like ‘hight’ and ‘dight’. She gives ample evidence
of her prosodic skill in employing different forms like the Ballad measure with
its variations (eight syllable quatrain; a mixture of eight and six syllables; lines
arranged in eight and twelve line units); Blank verse; five, eight and eleven line
stanza forms, and the sonnet. Unlike Sarojini Naidu, she is no singer, and her
short poems, like what is perhaps her best-known single piece, ‘Our Casuarina
Tree’, often strike a note of nostalgia. In her narratives she is sometimes flat-
footed as in, ‘Savitri liked her new life much’ and ‘Can we in such / A matter
delicate, proceed?’ Her artistic immaturity is also revealed when, ignoring the
lesson to be learned from Milton’s deliberate vagueness in his description of
Death in Paradise Lost, Book II (‘The other shape/If shape is might be called
that shape had none’) she attempts a detailed description of Yama, the god of
Death (‘His skin was dark as bronze’ etc.) and fails to create the desired effect of
awe and terror. And at one place she even descends to bathos, when she makes
Savitri take her husband’s soul, ‘no bigger than a thumb’, and run to his lifeless
body in which she presumably inserts it, like a clever housewife armed with a
do-it-yourself kit swiftly fitting a spare part to a faulty kitchen stove.

But none of these failings is such as a chance to grow .and mature would not
have easily corrected. What is most impressive about Toru Dutt’s poetry is its
virtually total freedom from imitation (in contrast with Kashiprasad Ghose and
M.M. Dutt) at an age when most writers are in their artistic swaddling clothes.
She quotes from Pope and Wordsworth, but it would be difficult to cite definite
examples of psittacism in her verse. This indicates that hers was an individual
talent capable of growing according to the laws of its own nature. It is therefore
all the more sad that she died Keatslike, before her pen had gleaned her ‘teaming
brain.’ Edmund Gosse’s well-known des- cription of her as ‘this fragile blossom
of song’2 is certainly misleading. There is nothing ‘Glass Menagerie’ like about
Toru Dutt’s poetry. Her best work has the qualities of a quiet strength, of deep
emotion held under artistic restraint and an acute awareness of the abiding values
of Indian life. Permitted a few more years of life, she could have proved capable
of far greater things, as her actual achievement, though slender, unmistakably
indicates.

Toru Dutt’s authenticity stands out in sharp relief, when one turns to Behramji
Merwanji Malabari (1853-1912), whose The Indian Muse in English Garb
(1876) appeared in the same year as Toru Dutt’s first collection. There is more
of the ‘English garb’ (and that too soiled by the Indian dust) than of the ‘Indian
Muse’ in this slim collection of 32 pieces. It opens with half a dozen specimens
of occasional verse, celebrating the ‘great and Heav’n-directed Sovereign’
Queen Victoria, the ‘Sun of India’, i.e., the Prince of Wales, and the Prince
consort. Even personal emotion fails to give wings to Malabari’s pedestrian
muse. While lamenting the death of his benefactor, Dr. John Wilson, the best he
can manage is‘those briny pearls... trembling in your widow’s eyes.’ The
exercises in social criticism like ‘The Stages of a Hindu Female Life’ and
‘Nature Triumphs over Caste’, with their stereotyped mouthing of conventional
sentiment do more credit to Malabari’s reformists zeal than to his muse. Pieces
like ‘The Folly of War’ and ‘Defence of Time’ Show his pitiful attempts to run
with the Neo-classical hare, while in those like‘An Ode to Night’ and ‘Lost
Love’, he tries unsuccessfully to hunt with the romantic hounds. Atrocious
rhymes like ‘slavery-mockery’ and ‘misery- memory’ tell an equally dismal tale
about Malabari’s technique. His best effort is ‘A Sketch’—a lively
autobiographical piece in Popean Heroic couplets, in which Malabari for once
happily gives free rein to his talent for satirical observation of men and manners,
which is seen to far better advantage in his prose works.

Apart from Malabari, the then Bombay presidency also heard contemporary
minor voices like a fellow-Parsi, Cowasji Nowrosi Vesuvala (Courting the
Muse, 1879); the poet who wrote under the ‘spicy' name ‘Chili Chutnee’ (Social
Scraps and Satires,1878), M.M. Kunte (The Risi, 1879), and Nagesh
Wishwanath Pal '(1860-1920) who, like Malabari, makes a better showing as a
prose writer. His The Angel of Misfortune: A Fairy Tale (1904) is a romantic
narrative of about 5000 lines in ten books, recounting the legend of King
Vikramaditya of Avanti and Ujjain, his relentless persecution by the god Shani,
‘the Angel of Misfortune’ and his final deliverance through the love of Princess
Indira, daughter of the ruler of Champa. Writing under the inevitable shadow of
his Romantic and Victorian masters, Pal tells his tale competently in derivative
blank verse but unlike Toru Dutt, he cannot make his legend pulsate with life.

It was, however, not Bombay, but Bengal—the first home oflndian English
literature—that was to continue to dominate the poetic scene for many more
years. Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909), a cousin of Toru Dutt, was an Indian
Civil Service official who retired voluntarily at the age of fortynine in order to
devote himself to scholarly and creative writing. He wrote in both Bengali and
English; all his original creative work was in Bengali and his English verse all in
the form of translations, while he wrote reflective and critical prose in English.
His Lays of Ancient India (1894) is a collection of workmanlike
versetranslations from Sanskrit and Prakrit classics including the Rigveda, the
Upanishads, Kalidasa and Bharavi, and Buddhist texts like theDhammapada.
The translations of the Mahabharata (1895) and the Ramayana (1899) are a far
more ambitious undertaking. Dutt’s aim was to produce condensed versions of
these two great Indian epics; and the method he adopts is not abridgement, but
the selection of major incidents for complete translation, with the linking up of
these portions by short connecting notes. He thus reduces the 48,000 lines of the
Ramayanaand the 200,000 of the Mahabharata to 4,000 each; and copying the
model of the Western epic, he adopts the twelve book structure, whereas the
Sanskrit Ramayana contains seven kandas and the Mahabharata eighteen parvas.
In his epilogue to the translation of the Mahabharata, Dutt claims to have tried to
preserve something of the ‘musical movement’ of the original in the English
translation. With this aim in view, he employs the ‘Locksley Hall’ metre as the
‘nearest equivalent’ to the Anustubh or slokametre of bis originals.

If the epic sweep and complexity of these Hindu classics is inevitably lost in
Dutt’s condensations, the spirit of the originals also evaporates as a result of this
extremely unhappy metrical choice. The sloka metre, with a pause dividing each
line into two parts, has the qualities of simplicity, vigour and energy, native to
folk poetry, and lends itself easily to trenchant and frequently epigrammatic
expression. With its easy flexibility, it is also capable of almost endless varieties
of mood, tone and effect. These are precisely the qualities which the ‘Locksley
Hall’ metre, with its jingling rhythm (which inevitably palls when served in
large doses), its uniform flow and its sophistication and polish, singularly lacks.
Furthermore, in order to fill in the long flowing lines of his chosen measure, the
translator is often compelled to use a lot of padding, thus disturbing the taut
structure of the original. For instance, Sita’s memorable words to Rama in the
Ayodhyakanda:

Na pita natmajb natma na mata na sakhljanah Iha pretya qa narlnam patirekd

gatih sada

are translated extremely loosely as ‘Sire nor son nor loving brother rules the
wedded woman's state/With her lord she falls or rises, with her consort courts
her fate.’ Here, the concentrated epigrammatic force of the last fout key words is
irretrievably lost in the diffuse second line of Dutt’s rendering which contains
more than three times the words in the original without a third of its clinching
quality. While acknowledging fully Dutt’s services in making these two great
Hindu epics easily accessible to the Western reader in the popular idiom of late
Victorianism, the final verdict on his translations must be the same as that well-
known assessment of Pope’s Homer: ‘A pretty poem . .. but not Homer'.

Among the younger contemporaries of R.C. Dutt was Man- mohan Ghose
(1869-1924), whose poetic career is a classic example of how the lack of roots
stunts the growth of an artist cursed with ‘an exile’s heart’ in his bosom.
Educated in a convent school away from home, Manmohan was sent to England
for higher education at the age of ten. English became his first language and his
own mother tongue remained almost a closed book to him. His overpowering
sense of alienation was accentuated by an unhappy childhood and adolescence.
He never perhaps recovered fully from the childhood trauma of his mother’s
insanity and his father’s sternness. (He describes his father as ‘so strangely
unsentimental that I am assured he would vivisect me if he thought that was my
highest good.’24) As he once wrote to Laurence Binyon, 'Thus from childhood I
was subject to fits of gloom and despondency which grew with my age... . Also,
I believe there is something repulsive about me. Nobody ever took a liking to
me. ... As a boy I often perceived with jealousy that my brothers were always
perferred to me.’ Going upto Oxford in 1887, where he specialized in classical
literature, he made friends with the poets of the Decadent school and had his
poems published in the collection Primavera of which Binyon was one of the
editors. Unwilling to return to India after his graduation, he once wrote to
Binyon, 'I shall try to persuade my father to let me stay in England for good; I
am sure with the tastes I have I shall be of no use in India ’2* And again, ‘There
is nothing I dread so much as going back to India. I feel quite at home with my
surroundings here. ... There I should be utterly out of sympathy with everything.
I know neither the people nor the language—all is strange and alien. I am
fourfifths an Englishman, if not entirely one; and it is in England I should do the
most good to my country and myself.’21 But all his efforts to get a post in the
British Museum and the civil service failed. Compelled to return to India in
1894, after the death of his father, he became a professor of English in a
Government college in Bengal. Utterly frustrated and totally alienated from the
life around, he wrote to Binyon, ‘Green things are indeed wonderful here, but
brown things (that is man) is absurdly out of sympathy with me.’ In another
letter he laments, ‘For years not a friendly step has crossed my threshold. With
English people in India there can be only a nodding acquaintance or official
connection, and with Indians my purely English upbringing and breeding puts
me out of harmony; denationalised, that is then the word for me.’ His marriage
in 1898 and the subsequent birth of a daughter brought him a brief spell of
happiness, before tragedy struck in 1905, when his wife was permanently
paralysed by a heavy fall, though she lingered on, with intermittent spells of
recovery till her death in 1918. Manmohan himself died six years later, a blind,
broken man, who had planned just a few months before to settle down in
England after his imminent retirement.

Manmohan Ghose’s poems in Primavera (1890), which also included the work
of Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon and Arthur Cripps, are typical of the mood
of world-weariness and yearning and the colourful aestheticism of the Eighteen
Nineties.Love Songs and Elegies (1898), while expressing the same strain more
effectively, adds to it a celebration of Nature, and a surer command of image and
phrase. Songs of Love and Death (1926), published posthumously, shows the
poet still lost in the fin de siecle world, as a lyric like ‘London’ (‘This is London.

I lie and twine in the root of things’) shows. Orphic Mysteries (‘Songs of Pain,
Passion and the Mystery of Death’) andImmortal Eve (‘Songs of the Triumph
and Mystery of Beauty’) were the products of a lyric upsurge following the
death of the poet’s wife in 1918, though they were published as late as in 1974,
in the collected edition. Here, the poet struggles through a direct and often
moving expression of personal sorrow towards consolation and the reassurance
of a reunion: ‘You my love/ Did with the roses burn/where you are gone I shall
not fear/ With roses to return.’ Perseus, the Gorgon Slayer, an epic, planned as
amagnum opus, was begun in 1898 but abandoned in 1914, under official
pressure, consequent to unfounded allegations that it was a seditious political
allegory. This fragment of six (out of the projected twelve) books runs to about
7500 lines of blank verse, and was to have for its central theme the idea of
progress in human history and the slaying of the spirit of stagnation and
annihilation (Medusa), which makes progress possible. An elegant pastiche
entirely classical in conception and execution, this is a copy-book example of the
‘epic delusion’ to which Indian English poets of the Nineteenth century, like
their American counterparts have often succumbed. Nollo and Damayanti, a
verse drama begun in 1916, after the abandonment ofPerseus, the Gorgon Slayer,
also remained incomplete and is of interest chiefly as a rather belated attempt to
handle Indian poetic material, though the principal characters here are shadows
of Shakespearian figures bearing Indian names. Adam Alarmed in Paradise
(1918), a ‘lyric epic', also remained a fragment.

Manmohan Ghose’s work reveals a limited but genuine poetic talent which,
however, failed to grow to its fullest stature. Hovering all through his life
between the two worlds of the England of the Eighteen Nineties and India—the
one ‘dead’, and the other ‘powerless to be born’ for him—he never fulfilled the
early promise of Primavera. His poetic equipment was by no means
inconsiderable. Perfectly at home with the English language, he bad an unfailing
sense of rhythm and a fine sensitivity to the sound and feel of words. His delight
in Nature and his passion for beauty were intense. His longer poems like ‘Inda’s
Idol’ show that along with a delicate lyricism, he was also capable of sustained
poetic flight in the narrative mode. Unfortunately, his spiritual home was the
England of the Age of Decadence. Long after he had been exiled from it, he
continued to be unaware that Camelot had totally vanished, while he equally
disastrously failed to realize the supreme importance of striking his roots in the
land of his birth, to which he returned, not as a native but as an alien. He was
therefore doomed to remain a minor figure and could not become a major voice.

A younger brother of Manmohan Ghose, Aurobindo Ghose (Sri Aurobindo)

(1872-1950) provides a striking contrast. Though he had very much the same
kind of upbringing as his elder brother, whom he accompanied to England at the
age of seven, Sri Aurobindo found his roots in Indian culture and thought
immediately on his return to India from Cambridge in 1893. Manmohan’s career
is a sad story of arrested artistic development; Sri Aurobindo’s, a glorious
chronicle of progress from patriot to poet, yogi and seer. After a brief, quiet spell
in Baroda State Service (1893-1906) and a much shorter but far more hectic one
as a political radical (1906-10), which landed him in jail for one year, Sri
Aurobindo escaped to Pondicherry (then a French possession) in 1910, and made
it his permanent home thereafter. His incipient mystical leanings had become
apparent immediately on his return to India. As he set foot on the Indian soil, ‘a
feeling of the Infinite pervading material space and the Immanent inhabiting
material objects and bodies’30 came to him, and instead of the murky pall that
had surrounded him while in England, now ‘a vast calm descended upon him
and surrounded him and remained with him for long months afterwards.’31
These tendencies strengthened by yogic practices led, when he was in Alipore
Jail, to a remarkable mystic experience which he described as ‘Narayana
Darshan’. Continuing his yoga at Pondicherry, he was joined in 1914 by a
French lady, Madame Mirra Richard (later known as the ‘Mother’), who
recognised in him the guru of her own quest. After another significant spiritual
experience characterized by him as the descent of a new power of consciousness,
on 24 November 1926, Sri Aurobindo withdrew into complete seclusion for
some time. He continued his spiritual quest and his literary work comprising
poetry, drama, philosophical, religious, cultural and critical writings unceasingly
till his death on 5 December 1950.

Sri Aurobindo’s long poetic career spanning sixty years yielded an impressive
volume of verse of several kinds—lyrical, narrative, philosophical, and epic. The
early Short Poems (1890- 1900) are mostly minor verse of the ‘romantic
twilight’ of the Eighteen Nineties, celebrating the characteristic themes of love,
sorrow, death and liberty in a typically romantic style to which the introduction
of Greek names like ‘Glaucus’ and ‘Atheon’ adds a classical touch, to be
expected of a young poet who, like his elder brother, was an accomplished
classical scholar. The call of mystic India is already heard here in the Envo5, in
which the poet hears Saraswati and the Ganges beckoning him. 0 1 Short Poems
1895-1908, written after Sri Aurobindo’s return to India strike a note of
rapturous mystic awareness in pieces like ‘Invitation' and ‘Revelation'. In . In
1930 and 1930-1950, he attempts reflective and symbolic verse as in ‘The
Rakshasas'and ‘The Meditations of Mandavya'. Sri Aurobindo also wrote some
remarkable sonnets, including 'Transformation', which distils the essence of a
mystic experience and that trenchant comment on modern technology— ‘A
Dream of Surreal Science'. The Poems in New Metres included inCollected
Poems(Collected Works, Vol. V) contain some of his best-known mystical lyrics
like ‘The Bird of Fire’ (1933), ‘Thought the Paraclete’ (1934) and ‘Rose of God’
(1934) which are charged with an emotional rapture, a verbal exuberance and a
passion for audacious technical innovation comparable to Hopkins in his most
characteristic vein.

Among the longer poems of the early period are three complete narratives:
‘Urvasie’, ‘Love and Death’ and ‘Baji Prabhou’ [sic.] and six fragments
including four with an Indian background—‘The Rishi’, ‘Chitrangada’,
‘Uloupie’ and ‘The Tale of Nala’, while of the remaining two, ‘The Vigil of
Thaliard’ has the setting of a medieval chanson and ‘Khaled of the Sea: An
Arabian Romance’ is an Eastern tale with Keatsian opulence. ‘Urvasie’, a poem
of about 1300 lines of blank verse and in four cantos, is a retelling of the ancient
Indian legend of King Pururavus and his love for the celestial damsel, Urvasie—
a legend immortalized by Kalidasa in his play,Vikramorvasia. The poet makes a
determined effort to give an epic cast to the narrative by employing epic similes,
set descriptions and Miltonic diction, even experimenting (rather successfully at
times) with the music of proper names as in this catalogue of the celestial
beauties: ‘Menaca, Misracayshie, Mullica/Rumbha, Nelabha, Shela,
Nolinie/Lolita, Lavonya and Tilottama—/Many delightful names.’ There is also
an unsuccessful attempt to secure a larger thematic dimension to this story of
personal love, by the introduction in the closing stages of the poem of an
inconclusive discussion of the question whether Pururavas has failed in his
kingly duty to his country by opting for reunion with Urvasie in heaven. The
elaborate epic machinery has the look of an intruder in this narrative with its
essentially romantic ethos; and the best parts of the poem are those which offer a
lyrical evocation of intense love, with all its agonies and ecstasies.

Love is also the central theme of ‘Love and Death’, a poem of about 1100 lines
of blank verse based on an ancient Hindu legend with a remarkable resemblance
to the Greek legend of Orpheus and Euridice. It is the story of Ruru, son of the
rishi Bhrigu, and his beloved Pramadvara (called ‘Priyamvada’ by the poet,
since he thought this would be ‘more manageable to the English tongue’), the
daughter of the celestial nymph, Menaka. Priyamvada dies of snake* bite and is
carried to the nether world of Death. Ruru, braving heavy odds, finds his way
into this region and brings her back. Here again an essentially lyrical narrative is
unsuccessfully sought to be given an epic colouring. Ruru’s descent into the
nether world obviously recalls Homer, Virgil and Dante and there are the
inevitable Miltonic similes, inversions and Latinized diction. Sri Auro- bindo’s
claims for the poem are far more modest than those by some of his admirers. In a
letter, he observes, ‘For full success it (the poem) should have had a more
faithfully Hindu colouring, but it was written a score of years ago (1899) when I
had not penetrated to the heart of the Indian idea and its traditions, and the
shadow of the Greek underworld and Tartarus with the sentiment of life and love
and death which hangs about them has got into the legendary framework of the
Indian patala and hells.’

Of the three longer poems, ‘Baji Prabhou’ (a more correct transliteration, to the
Maharashtrian ear, would have been ‘Prabhu’) is, on the whole, the most
successful, in fulfilling its limited. purpose of spirited narration of military
heroism. As the Author’s note on the poem points out, ‘this poem is founded on
the historical incident of the heroic self-sacrifice of Baji Prabhou Dcshpande,
who to cover Shivaji’s retreat, held the pass of Rangana for two hours with a
small company of men against twelve thousand Moguls [sic]. Beyond the single
fact of this great exploit there has been no attempt to preserve historical
accuracy.’33While a creative artist is certainly entitled to take liberties—even
great liberties—with historical fact, the poet’s apparently hazy acquaintance with
the story of Baji (known to every school boy in Baroda State where Sri
Aurobindo lived at the time) has unfortunately made him miss the crucial point
in the episode, thus affecting its very artistic potential. He makes his hero hold
back the enemy until Shivaji returns from Raigurh in ’two brief hours’. Apart
from the fact that this would have been an impossible feat in pre-aviation days,
since Raigurh is more than a hundred miles from Rangana, the reasons for
Shivaji’s dash to Raigurh and back are left obscure, thus robbing Baji’s heroic
stand of any weighty purpose. In actual fact, Baji’s task was to contain the
enemy in the Rangana pass until Shivaji, fleeing from besieged Panhala to
Vishalgad (about sixty miles away) reached the safety of the fort. (The pass was
only a few miles away from Shivaji’s destination). Immediately upon doing so,
he was to fire the cannon and Baji died with the reassuring boom of the cannon
making sweet music in his ears. (The poet has also confused the Moghul with
the Adilshahi forces, which were actually pursuing Shivaji here—but that is a
detail which should make only the historian wince more). Sri Aurobindo’s hero
dies fighting, but without earning the satisfaction of knowing that he has ensured
the safety of. his master. This one flaw apart, ‘Baji Prabhou’ is a stirring
narrative of battle in virile blank verse which has something of the energy and
vigour of ‘The Battle of Maldon’, with some evocative description of the ragged
Deccan landscape and many rousing rhetorical flourishes.

With his classical scholarship, Sri Aurobindo had a constant fascination for the
quantitative metre. Obviously undaunted by Tennyson’s denunciation of
‘barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameters’, and contrary to accepted opinion,
he held that ‘the freedom of the use of quantitative verse for the creation of new
original rhythms would be enough to add a wide field to the large and opulent
estate of English poetry. His two most ambitious efforts in quantitative
hexameters are ‘Ilion’ and ‘Ahana’. Of the proposed (and inevitable) twelve
books of ‘llion’, an epic entirely on the Homeric pattern, the poet was able to
complete only eight and a part of the ninth, totalling about 5000 lines. Set
against the background of the Trojan War, the poem centres round the clash
between Achilles and the Amazonian Queen Penthesilea. In addition to many
Homeric characters, the poet also puts the entire epic machinery into operation,
including catalogues of armies, descriptions of battle, long debates and the
intervention of supernatural agencies, etc. To have sustained all this—and that
too in a difficult metre— almost but not quite, to the bitter epic end (even Sri
Aurobindo faltered, when actually in sight of his goal of twelve books) is indeed
a tour de force. The one thing sadly lacking is the living force of the poet’s own
voice (which is heard unmistakably in ‘Savitri’), there being too much of Homer
and too little of Sri Aurobindo in ‘llion’.

In ‘Ahana’, Sri Aurobindo has attempted an even more ambitious technical feat,
viz., a long poem in more than 250 rhymed hexameter couplets. Ahana is the
Divine Dawn who descends into the world and is greeted by the ‘Hunters of
Joy’, ‘the Seekers of Knowledge’ and ‘the Climbers in quest of Power’. She
takes pity on Man and finally assures him, ‘Thou shall not suffer always nor cry
to me, lured and forsaken.’ She invites him to ‘follow the dance I shall teach
thee'; this is the Divine Dance of Delight, symbolized in the Ras of Krishna’s
Brindavan. While the ordinary reader is likely to find the long- and opulent
descriptions and the even longer rhetorical speeches in spacious hexameters
frequently overpowering, the initiated will not fail to realise that ‘Ahana’ is, in
many ways, a prologue to ‘Savitri'. The central theme of the descent of the
Divine to the earth, the symbolism of ‘Dawn’ and the allegorical figures like ‘the
Hunters of Joy', etc. distinctly anticipate ‘Savitri'.

In fact, the entire poetic career of Sri Aurobindo may be seen as a long and
arduous preparation for the writing of hismagnum opus, ‘Savitri’ (first definitive
edition, 1954). In the mystical short poems of the early and middle periods he
had expressed bis intimations of divinity briefly in the lyric mode; the longer
narratives—‘Urvasie’, ‘Love and Death’ and ‘Baji Prabhou’—had all shown him
to be preoccupied with the theme of death and separation and the different ways
to neutralize these negative forces in human life. In the first two of these poems
and in 'Ilion'he had trained himself in the epic mode. All these lessons learned
earlier contributed to the making of ‘Savitri', an ambitious epic of 23, 813 lines,
in twelve books and forty-nine cantos, on which the poet worked for fifty years
and more, though a part of the poem remained incomplete at the time of his
death. Originally written as a simple legendary verse narrative in two parts and
eight books, the work was continuously revised by the poet almost till the end of
bis days and shaped into an epic of humanity and divinity, of death and the life
divine. Sri Aurobindo himself describes it as ‘a sort of poetic philosophy of the
spirit and of life,’3* and ‘an experiment in mystic poetry, spiritual poetry cast
into a symbolic figure.’**

‘Savitri’ is a retelling of the well-known legend of prince Satyavan and Savitri,

his devoted wife, who rescues him from Death, narrated in about 7C0 lines in the
Mahabharata, and is a story of pure love conquering death. Sri Aurobindo makes
no substantial changes in the outlines of his rather uncomplicated narrative, so
far as the external action is concerned; but he invests the major characters with a
symbolism all his own and also adds a new dimension of a highly complex inner
action to the original. Thus, Aswapathy’s yoga is only briefly mentioned in the
original; Sri Aurobindo expands it to fill slightly less than half the poem.
Similarly, Savitri’s penance, described equally briefly in the Mahabharata story,
is developed into a yoga which takes the poet 5,000 lines to expound. The final
confrontation between Savitri and Death is also expanded more than tenfold, so
as to enable the poet to present his spiritual message.

Both the main aim and the poetic strategy of ‘Savitri’ are indicated in the sub-
title, ‘A legend and a symbol’. The ancient Hindu legend has been made here a
vehicle of Sri Aurobindo’s symbolic expression of his own philosophy of Man’s
realization of the ‘life divine’ on this earth. The symbolism has'been explained
by Sri Aurobindo himself.37 Savitri is ‘The Divine Word, daughter of the sun,
goddess of the Supreme Truth, who comes down and is born to save’; Satyavan
is ‘the Soul carrying the Divine Truth of Being within itself, but descended into
the grip of death and ignorance’; and Aswapathy, Savitri’s father, who does
penance for eighteen years is ‘the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour’
that helps man ‘to rise from the mortal to the imm'drtal planes’. Sri Aurobindo
thus sings, not of ‘Arms and the Man’, but of the Spirit and the Woman
incarnate as Truth. His epic recounts how Man (Aswapathy) through arduous
spiritual endeavour succeeds in breaking through the barriers of mortal nature
and finally compels the Divine (Savitri) to descend on to this earth to save the
human soul (Satyavan) which is the prisoner of mortality from death.
For an epic of such immense length (it is twice as long as Paradise Lost and
Paradise Regained put together and the only epic longer than it is Kazantzakis’s
Odyssey, a Modern Sequel), ‘Savitri'has a well-planned structure. Its twelve
books are divided into three parts. The poem begins in medias res describing the
day on which Satyavan is to die, but Part I comprising the first three books is
devoted mainly to an exposition of Aswa- pathy’s spiritual quest, cast in the
form of a retrospective narration. His yoga involves both descent into Night and
ascent through carefully mapped out stages to the World Soul till he gains
Supreme Knowledge. Not content with personal salvation and yearning to secure
the Divine descent on to the earth, he prays to the Divine Mother, who responds
and promises that ‘one shall descend and break the iron law/Change Nature’s
doom to the lone Spirit’s power.’ Thus reassured, Aswapathy returns to the
earth.

Part II (Books IV to VIII) narrates the story of Savitri’s birth and upbringing, her
search for her life-mate, her insistence on marrying Satyavan (‘I know that thou
—only thou art he’) in spite of Sage Narad’s warning that the youth is doomed
to, die within a year, and her brief but happy married life till the fateful day of
Satyavan’s death. Book VIII describes Savitri’s yoga for fortifying herself for
her coming encounter with Death. Her quest is for total self-realization, which
alone can give her the power to defy Death. Quite as arduous as that of her
father, this quest, also recounted in equally carefully marked out stages, is
described allegorically in terms of a long and difficult journey. At last, in the last
chamber of a mystic cave, Savitri meets her ‘secret soul’:‘They rushed into each
other and grew one.’Two more realizations follow: that her secret soul is
supracosmic, and that she can achieve a superior consciousness and defeat the
forces of Negation by suffering the world’s sorrow. Armed with this realization
Savitri returns to her daily routine, awaiting that last meeting with death. At the
end of Part II, we are thus again back to the fateful day on which the action of
the epic begins.

Part III (Books IX to XII) describes the struggle between Savitri and Death, who
siezes the dead Satyavan’s soul, as predicted. In the long debates between the
two, Death, the ‘dark- browed sophist’ employs various strategies including
casuistry, intimidation and blandishments, but Savitri refuses to accept defeat.
Finally, upon Savitri’s claim that she herself is part of the Divine Truth, Death
challenges her to prove it by showing her form as Truth. As she does so,
refulgent in all her divine glory, Death, utterly demoralized, frantically implores
Night, Hell and the Inconscient for support, but in vain. As he panics and flees,
Satyavan returns to life. In Book XI, Savitri finds Death himself now
transformed into a Being of Light. A final trial, however, still awaits her. A
voice from her own heart tempts her by suggesting that now that she has
conquered Death, she and her husband need not return to the earth at all, but
accept individual bliss in the higher world, since there is no guarantee that the
whole of mankind can achieve what she has done. A celestial voice asks her four
times to make up her mind. Refusing to be tempted, Savitri is firm in her resolve
to return to the earth, ‘to change the earthly life to life divine’. The Supreme now
reassures her that her choice is right—that, in fact, it is His own choice. In a long
speech, He tells the youthful couple that they represent God’s dual power—
Savitri the ‘Force’ and Satyavan ‘the soul/operating on earth to divinise it’. In
the concluding book, Savitri and Satyavan return to ‘the manyvoiced human
world’ in the evening, while Night ‘in her bosom nursed a greater dawn*. It is
noteworthy that the actual action of the epic takes place on a single day, as in
James Joyce’s Ulysses, all the rest being cast in the form of retrospective
narration.

As this outline indicates, ‘Savitri’ is not just another imitative and stale exercise
in the western epic mode; it is an utterly unconventional, highly original and
deeply philosophical Hindu epic in which Sri Aurobindo has ‘metred the
rhythm-beats of eternity’. It is clearly an epic with a difference—a bold
experiment in the epic genre. Unlike the traditional epic, it has very little action
in it and most of what happens in it takes place on the symbolic plane, in the
regions of inner reality. Instead of the usual epic canvas crowded with
characters, it contains hardly half a dozen characters in all and the major figures
are all symbolic. ‘Savitri’ is thus an ‘inner epic’, an epic of the soul and the
Oversoul. Nor is it, like Toru Dutt’s ballad, a simple retelling of an ancient
Hindu myth. It is a distillation of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of Integral Yoga,
according to which ‘God must be born on earth and be as Man/Tbat Man being
human may grow even as God.’ Furthermore, its central thesis is in line with
modern thinking about the evolution of Man and human consciousness. It has
surprisingly close affinities to modern theories such as Bergson’s idea of the elan
vital and creative evolution and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of a future,
when Man graduating into a superior consciousness will grow into more than
Man. ‘Savitri’ is thus an exciting and prophetic vision of a glorious future, not a
dull recital of a dead past.

The metre of ‘Savitri’ is also an equally bold departure from established poetic
practice. The poem is written in ‘blank verse without enjambment (except rarely)
each line a thing by itself and arranged in paragraphs of one, two, three, four or
five lines (rarely a longer series), in an attempt to catch something of the
Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement, as far as that is a possibility in
English.’38 As Sri Aurobindo adds, ‘You can’t take that as a model—it is too
difficult a rhythm-structure to be a model.’39 The obvious danger in the use of
end-stopped blank verse in a poem of such dimensions is that of stiffness and
rigidity in rhythm and there are passages in which the poet does pay the expected
penalty. But it has often gone unnoticed that Sri Aurobindo secures considerable
variety and flow of rhythm in a number of ways such as frequent modulation,
changes in ordering of the line-units, alterations in pace by the admixture of
Latinized and simple diction, constant shifts in the position of caesura in
individual lines and consequent variations in texture. In fact, his technique is
similar to that of Pope’s heroic couplets in these respects and like Pope he too
frequently achieves the epigrammatic quality time and again as in lines like ’To
see her was a summons to adore.’

The diction and imagery of ‘Savitri’ are manifestly influenced by Miltonic and
Romantic models—the obvious models available to Sri Aurobindo when he
started writing the poem. The poem abounds in abstract, Latinized diction,
Keatsian double adjectives and typically Romantic imagery. This has often led
the prejudiced critic to dismiss it summarily as a totally derivative poem. Closer
scrutiny reveals that the diction of the poem often attains a stark simplicity when
occasion demands, as in Savitri’s rejoinder to Death, ‘I am, I love, I see, I act, I
will.’ And as for all those abstract words, the poet obviously needs them, not
because he wants to out-Milton Milton, but because he has to deal with things of
the spirit. Again, those who pigeonhole the imagery of the poem as totally
‘romantic’ strangely ignore the great variety of images in ‘Savitri’, some of
which are‘modern’ in the best vein of poetry in the age of technology: for
instance, the universe is an 'ocean of electrical energy’ and ‘Dark beings’ come
‘televisioned from the gulfs of night’. Surely, a poet who talks of the ‘calculus of
Destiny’ and the ?

Mystic Morse of God’ cannot be labelled a cringing camp-follower of Milton

and Keats.

Other charges usually levelled at ‘Savitri’ are that it is too long, repetitious and
vague. Mere length can surely be no flaw in an epic, the art of which consists in
‘deliberate amplification'and only the casual reader and the careless critic will
complain of repetition, in view of the sharply defined outlines of the entire
narrative. In fact, though the motif of quest is repeated.

Aswapathy’s yoga is clearly differentiated from that of Savitri in its various

stages. And one strongly suspects that those who complain of vagueness in the
narrative have simply not cared to read the detailed accounts of the journeys of
Aswapathy and Savitri which are visualised in extremely vivid, concrete terms.
To those who find the poem totally lacking in human interest (one recalls a
similar complaint against Paradise Lost) the poet has already given an answer in
his subtitle, ‘a legend and a symbol’. And as already noted, those apt to dismiss
‘Savitri’ as another traditional exercise in ‘weak-kneed spiritual poetry’ have
strangely shut their eyes to Sri Aurobindo’s world-view and its urgent
contemporary relevance.

It is, however, not easy to assess ‘Savitri’ as a work of art, in view of the poet’s
claim that there is ‘a general overmind influence'40 in the poem, and that the
entire work, including the corrections, came from a higher source. This has
naturally led some of his admirers to regard the poem purely as‘a revelation’,41
and surely no critical evaluation is at all possible under such conditions. If it is
permissible to try to evaluate this kind of ‘overmind’ poetry by using the
obviously limited tools of the present day critical mind—and of one individual
mind with all its numerous inadequacies, in particular—one may notice several
possible limitations. Even the most devout admirers will have to concede that the
poem does have ups and downs of creative excellence inevitable in a
composition of such huge proportions. Thus, the incomplete Book VIII (‘The
Book of Death’) is easily the weakest part of the epic, where both thought and
style suffer. In Book V (‘The Book of Love’) where the emphasis is clearly on
the human rather than the symbolic aspect of the characters of Savitri and
Satyavan, there is a definite lack of immediacy; and in the inordinately long
speech of of the Supreme at the close of Book XI (‘The Book of Everlasting
Day’) the poem totters perilously on the edge of the gulf between philosophical
poetry and versified philosophy. A few portions are so dense that they remain
obscure to any but the most devout; nor are passages wanting where the end-
stopped blank verse has become flat-footed and the authentic accents of Sri
Aurobindo have been drowned in echoes from his models.

‘Savitri’ is thus a major epic but not a perfect poem. It is however, an audacious
attempt to pour God’s wine which is perpetually new—into the age-old epic
bottle, transforming the receptacle itself in the process. With all its limitations—
and they are many—it remains a landmark in Indian English poetry. The first
major poetic voice in the annals of Indian English verse, Sri Aurobindo is a poet
of varied achievement in lyric, narrative and epic modes.

Sri Aurobindo invites comparison with another prominent contemporary, who

was actually his senior in age, but whose work in English began much later.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861- 1941), hailed by Mahatma Gandhi as ‘The Great
Sentinel’, was one of those versatile men of his Age, who touched and enriched
modern Indian life at several points. Poet, dramatist, novelist, short story writer,
composer, painter, thinker, educationist, nationalist and internationalist—such
were the various roles that Tagore played with uniform distinction during his
long and fruitful career. In his poetry (as in his work in the forms of drama and
the short story), Tagore presents a case of literary bilingualism which is perhaps
without a parallel in literary history. With the exception of a solitary poem
—‘The Child’(1931)—and a few verse epigrams originally written in English,
he wrote in Bengali, and creatively translated some of his work into English with
such remarkable success that his very first effort won him the Nobel Prize for
literature and to this day he remains the only Indian English writer to win this
distinction. Grandson of Prince Dwaraknath Tagore, who was an associate of
Rammobun Roy, and son of Maharshi Debendra- nath, a saintly Brahmo Samaj
leader, Rabindranath, born in a rich and cultured family, had little formal
schoqling, but his sharp poetic sensibility manifested itself very early. The semi-
mystical experience (described in his Bengali poem, ‘The Awakening of the
Waterfall') at the age of twenty-one, when, as he stood watching the sun rise, ‘all
of a sudden a covering seemed to fall away from my .eyes and I found the world
bathed in a wonderful radiance, with waves of beauty and joy swelling on every
side,’42 perhaps provides the key to Tagore’s major poetry of which, as he
himself said, the chief theme was ‘the relation between the finite and the
infinite.’43 As a young man, his work as manager of the family estates in North
Bengal involved frequent visits in a house-boat on inland water-ways to the
countryside. This brought opportunities for introspection, contemplation of
Nature in her changing moods and close acquaintance with rural life and
character, all of which provided a secure base for most of his work both in verse
and prose.

Tagore’s career as an Indian English poet began by sheer accident. In 1912, on

the eve of his departure to England for medical treatment, he tried his hand at
translating some of his Bengali poems into English. The manuscript, taken to
England, was lost in the Tube Railway, retrieved by Tagore’s son Rathindranath,
and came later to be rapturously hailed by William Rothenstein and W.B. Yeats.
The rest is history. Gitanjali (1912) took the literary world of London by storm
and was followed in quick succession by The Gardener (1913) and The Crescent
Moon (1913). The award of the Nobel Prize came in the same year. More
collections followed: Fruit-Gathering (1916), Stray Birds (1916), Lover's Gift
and Crossing (1918) and The Fugitive (1921). By this time Tagore’s reputation
in the English-speaking world had already suffered a disastrous decline. Only
two piore volumes in English appeared: Fireflies (1928) and the posthumously
published Poems (1942) of which all but the last nine were translated by Tagore
himself.

The task of the assessment of Tagore as an Indian English poet is extremely

difficult owing to a number, of factors. First, his literary reputation in the
English-speaking world has'swung to the two opposite extremes of temporary
adulation and unthinking condemnation; and what is even more puzzling is that
the most vociferous of his latter-day detractors—W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound,
for instance—were themselves his gushing admirers earlier. Secondly, Tagore’s
own view of his English verse is highly ambivalent. He writes to his niece, 'I did
not undertake this task in a spirit of reckless bravado; I simply felt an urge to
recapture, through the medium of another language, the feelings and sentiments
which had created such a feast of joy within me in past days.’44And again, in
another place, he declares, Iwas possessed by the pleasure of receiving anew my
feelings as expressed in a foreign tongue. I was making fresh acquaintance with
my own heart by dressing it in other clothes.’ At the same time, he also tells his
niece, ‘That I cannot write English is such a patent fact that I never had even the
vanity to feel ashamed of it. If anybody wrote an English note asking me to tea, I
did not feel equal to answering it. Perhaps you think that by now I have got over
that delusion, but in no way am I deluded that I have composed in English.’48 It
is difficult to reconcile this with what Tagore has said earlier to his niece in the
same letter. Furthermore, Tagore’s Bengali critics—naturally specially
privileged—usually find themselves compelled to judge his English verse only
in comparison with the Bengali original, and thus prejudge the issue of the real
artistic worth of Tagore’s English poetry (which they generally declare to be
inferior to the Bengali version). It is manifest that a just and fair assessment of
Tagore as an Indian English poet is possible only when none of these factors is
allowed to colour one’s judgement. Tagore’s English verse must be evaluated
solely on the strength of the English text before us, both as regards content and
form, and every other consideration must be held irrelevant.

The central theme of Gitanjali, Tagore*s finest achievement in English verse, is

devotion and its motto is, ‘I am here to sing thee songs.’ (Poem No. xv). These
songs, firmly rooted in the ancient tradition of Indian saint poetry, yet reveal a
highly personal quest for the Divine, characterized by a great variety of moods
and approaches. In his heart, the poet has ‘cut a path where fall Thy feet.’ Tagore
sees God as ‘unbroken perfection’, as the giver of ‘simple great gifts', ‘infinite
gifts’ which ‘come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass and
still thou pourest and still there is room to fill.’ But on occasion, He is also the
‘King of the fearful night’, armed with the ‘mighty sword, flashing as a flame,
heavy as a bolt of thunder.’ He is everywhere, the light of his music ‘illumines
the world’; ‘every moment and every age, every day and every night, he comes,
comes, ever comes.’ He is not to be found in the temple; ‘he is there where the
tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones.’
Hence, deliverance is not for the poet in renunciation; for one need not give up
this world, itself a beautiful creation of God, in order to reach Him (this is one of
the key ideas in all Tagore’s work). Hence again, mortality is no tragedy, for
Death is only God’s servant and messenger, and when he arrives, the poet can
say, ‘When I go from here let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is
unsurpassable’ (lines which were reportedly quoted by Wilfred Owen to his
mother upon going to the War) The poet adds, ‘In this playhouse of infinite
forms I have had my play and here have I caught sight of Him that is formless.’
But Tagore’s pilgrimage is not entirely a comfortable pilgrimage of joy. There
are moments of despair and frustration too, in it. At one place, the poet laments,
‘He came and sat by my side but I woke not. What a cursed sleep it was, O
miserable me!. . .Alas, why are my nights all thus lost?’ He also ruefully realizes
that he is a prisoner, who forged his own chain ‘very carefully’; and at another
place he watches helplessly as ‘they break into my sacred shrine, strong and
turbulent, and snatch with unholy greed the offerings from God’s altar.’ Pitifully,
he prays to God to ‘strike, strike at the root of penury in my heart.’ Tagore’s
final cry, however, is: ‘Like a flock of homesick cranes flying night and day
back to their mountain nests let all my life take its voyage to its eternal home in
one salutation to thee.’

The hundred and odd pieces in Gitanjati, bound by the cen- tral thread of the
devotional quest, exhibit a great variety of form also—a feature surprisingly
ignored by those who Hhve hastened to accuse Tagore of monotony. Apart from
the fact that they vary substantially in length, according to idea and mood, they
also range from a brief lyric cry (No. XLV) to dramatic episode (No. L); and
from allegory (No. LXIV) to rhetorical flourish (No. XXXV). The style too
shows a corresponding variety of expression. In moments of lyrical intensity it
takes wing, propelled by rhythmical repetition, alliteration and assonance, as in
‘Have you not heard his silent steps? He comes, comes, ever comes’; and ‘Light,
my light, the worldfilling light, the eye-kissing light, heart-sweetening light.’ It,
however, can also move appropriately nearer to the no man’s land of poetic
prose, when a strong narrative element demands it, as in: 'I had gone a-begging
from door to door in the village path, when thy golden chariot appeared in the
distance like a gorgeous dream and I wondered who was this King of all kings.
Above all, whatever the mode of expression, there is always a verbal control, a
precision of imagery and an unmistakable sense of disciplined rhythm as in
Whitman at his best, though the tone is far quieter, the harmonies more muted
and the general impression one of delicacy and grace rather than energy and
force.

The Gardener mostly presents Tagore, the poet of love. Possibly influenced by
Browning of whom be was a great admirer, Tagore exhibits a Browningesque
variety and complexity in his love poetry, though his setting, unlike that of the
British poet, is invariably rural and feudal. Like Browning, Tagore too is capable
of both the subjective and objective approaches, and can offer both a direct
outpouring of emotion and the poetry of situations, of which the very first piece
in the Gardener (The dialogue between the Servant and the Queen) is a fine
example. Furthermore, unlike most love poets (and here his resemblance to
Browning is specially marked), Tagore is able to present both the male and the
female points of view in love. For the lover in Tagore, Love has many facets. It
can be an intense and eager longing, an all-enveloping passion (‘Like a bird
losing its way I am caught’), a force which compels total self-effacement even in
a male (‘If you would have it so, I will end my singing.’) It is felt as a
debilitating influence (‘Free me from the bonds of your sweetness, my love’);
but it is fulfilment also (‘for a few fragrant hours we two have been made
immortal’). In a moment of acute introspection, love is also seen as an
evanescent spiritual essence that eludes human, grasp (‘I try to grasp the beauty;
it eludes me, leaving only the body in my hands. Baffled and weary I come
back’—a thought that is strongly reminiscent of Browning’s ‘Two in the
Campagna’). For the Tagore woman too, love has many moods and many
voices. It is shy, timid and unspoken on the one hand (‘For very shame I could
not say, “she is I, young traveller, she is I” ’) and capricious and self-willed on
the other (Isharply chid him and said “Go” ... I weep and ask my heart, “why
does he not come back?”). It involves both frustration (‘Your path lies open
before you, but you have cut off my return’) and complete self- surrender ('But
the young Prince did pass by our door, and I flung the jewel from my breast
before his path’). In form and style The Gardener makes no further advance; on
the other hand, there are already tell-tale signs of a tendency to a general
slackening in rhythm, a relaxing of verbal discipline, a loss of spontaneity and
freshness and occasional lapses in taste (e.g. ‘saved from the shivering shame of
the shelterless’, LVI).

The Tagore magic is, however, still strong enough in The Crescent Moon, the
chief motif in which is childhood. Poetry of childhood is of two kinds: it may
either offer the outsider’s— the adult view of the child, or the insider’s—the
child’s point of view. Tagore attempts both with frequent success. Looking at the
child with adult eyes, Tagore mostly gives us the typically romantic view of
childhood, inevitably lapsing on occasion into sheer namhy-pambiness. At the
same time, in a piece like ‘On the Seashore’ (‘On the seashore of endless worlds
children meet’ —an echo of which appears in Hart Crane’s poem, ‘The bottom
of the sea is cruel’)48 he spontaneously invests the everyday picture of children
playing on the seashore with a cosmic and symbolic significance, producing one
of his most memorable poems. The ‘insider’ pieces reveal a true understanding
of the child mind as in ‘The Wicked Postman’ (‘Mother dear. . . Haven’t you got
a letter from father today?... I myself will write all father’s letters. ... I shall write
from A right up to K'); ‘Superior’ (‘Mother, your baby is silly! She is so
absolutely childish’); and ‘Twelve O’ clock’ (‘If twelve O’ clock can come in
the night, why can’t the night come when it is twelve O’ clock?’). It must,
however, be noted that instances are not wanting, where the poet descends to the
level of a clever prettiness also. There is a greater variety of situation here than
in The Gardener, and a subdued, quiet humour is a new feature of style.

The later collections— Fruit-Gathering, Lover's Gift and Crossing and The
Fugitive show a distinct decline in quality. Each, with its mixed fare, lacks the
unity of theme of the earlier works. It is also clear that Tagore has, by now,
become not only repetitive but stale and has very little new to offer by way of
thought, mood or technique. Mostly gone too are the trenchancy of expression,
the superb verbal control and the severe rhythmical discipline of the Gitanjali (an
occasional flash like ‘Rebelliously I put out the light in my house and your sky
surprised me with its stars’—Lover's Gift, xxiii—only serves as a sad reminder
of how much has irretrievably been lost). Only the Last Poems reveals glimpses
of a new development. Written in declining years and often from the sick-bed,
some of them are frightening records of a grim struggle with pain, sorrow and
disillusion, of a mind which at certain moments is not so sure of all that it had
comfortably believed in earlier, though Tagore’s basic ideas remain the same.
The two collections of free verse epigrams— Stray Birds and Fireflies have
undeservedly suffered neglect in the backwash of the general decline in Tagore’s
reputation in the West. Some of these chips from Tagore’s poetic workshop are
memorable utterances of an alert, reflective mind steeped in Hindu thought and
at the same time keenly aware of the problems of the modern age. Apart from
the delicate sensibility and the command of sharply visualized imagery of his
best poetry, these epigrams often reveal a gift for ironic observation which has
had little scope elsewhere in his verse.

‘The Child’—the only published poem of considerable length Tagore wrote

directly in English (the Bengali version,ShishuTirtha was written later)—was
directly inspired by a performance of the Oberammergau Passion play in
Germany in 1930, though the‘leader’in the poem was perhaps modelled on
Gandhi. It was written at the request of a German film company which wanted
from him a script for a pageant of Indian life, though the film was never
produced. This is a rather conventional allegory in which ‘the Man of Faith’,
who leads the toiling and suffering multitudes on a long and arduous pilgrimage,
is killed during the night by his despairing and impatient followers. They are
later shocked at what they have done and panic, but the spirit of the victim leads
them at dawn to a hut where a mother sits on a strawbed with a ‘babe on her
lap’. The poem concludes with the chorus, ‘Victory to Man, the new-born, the
everliving.’ The crude symbolism, garish colours and general wordiness of ‘The
Child’ stand in sharp constrast with the subtler effects of The Gitanjali.

Tagore’s verse in English (as that in his mother tongue) is essentially lyrical in
quality, though unlike in Bengali, it is not the song-lyric that he attempts here.
(But at least one of the Gitanjali pieces has successfully been set to music—No.
LXV was once sung by Dame Isabella Thorndike.) His subjects are the
elemental subjects of all lyrical poetry—God, Nature, Love, the Child, Life and
Death, and he brings to his treatment of them the born lyric poet’s simplicity,
sensuousness and passion. His is a poetry steeped in the Indian ethos, because he
sings with the Upanishads in his bones. His basic ideas are mostly from this
source: God is no remote Absolute for him but is an entity embodying sat, chit
and ananda; and the universe is a joyous expression of God’s play; evil is but
part of the Infinite Perfection; the finite world and the body are both real and
good, and human love a step to divine; man must remain close to Nature for
Nature is a manifestation of the Divine; all misery arises out of self-will and self-
love and the antidote to these is universal brotherhood. As Jawaharlal Nehru puts
it, ‘He was in line with the rishis, the great sages of India, drawing from the
wisdom of the ancient past and giving it a practical garb and meaning in the
present. Thus, he gave India’s own message in a new language in keeping with
the yugadharma, the spirit of the times.’*

Tagore’s style, at its very best, skilfully controls the pliant rhythms of free verse
combining ‘the feminine grace of poetry with the virile power of prose.’*1 It is a
style that derives its strength from the subtly controlled tension between its easy,'
colloquial idiom and stark simplicity on the one hand, and the antique flavour of
archaisms like ‘thee* and 'thou* and the strange colourfulness of the feudal
imagery of king and prince, chariot and sword, garland and gold, on the other.
Tagore is, of course, a very unequal poet. His fatal fluency often led to repetition
and verbosity, sentimentality and vacuity. But this should not eclipse the shining
authenticity of The Gitanjali. At his best, Tagore remains a poet with a delicate
sensibility deeply Indian in spirit.

Younger than both Sri Aurobindo and Tagore, Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949),
however, won recognition in England much earlier. Daughter of a Bengali
educationist settled in the former princely State of Hyderabad, Sarojini Naidu,
nee Chatto- padhyaya, was a precocious child and started writing poetry at a
very early age. Sailing to England when sixteen, she studied at London and
Cambridge for three years. Here her poetic talent developed under the influence
of the Rhymers’ Club and the encouragement given by Arthur Symons and
Edmund Gosse. Rightly finding in her early verse ‘the note of the mocking bird
with a vengeance’, Gosse advised her ‘to set her poems firmly among the
mountains, the gardens, the temples, to introduce to us the vivid population of
her own voluptuous and unfamiliar province; in other words, to be a genuine
Indian Poet of the Deccan, not a clever, machine-made imitator of English
classics.’*2 On her return to India in 1898, she married Dr. Govindarajulu Naidu
—an inter-caste and interprovincial marriage, which met with initial opposition
from her parents. Her first volume of poetry. The Golden Threshold (1905) was
followed by The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917). Meanwhile,
social reform and the freedom struggle had begun increasingly claiming her
energies, and thereafter she wrote poetry only sporadically. Her collected poems
appeared in The Sceptred Flute (1946). Feather of the Dawn, a small collection
of lyrics written in 1927, was published posthumously in 1961. In the Gandhian
age she became one of the foremost political figures of her generation (she was
President of the Indian National Congress in 1925) and won fame as a leading
orator. She continued to be active in public life after Independence also and was
Governor of Uttar Pradesh when she died.
Sarojini Naidu’s lyric art has been strongly influenced both by British
romanticism—especially of The fin de siecle variety, and Persian and Urdu
poetic modes, with their characteristic opulence. The century and a quarter of
lyrics brought together in The Sceptred Flute are rather unsystematically
grouped under eleven mutually overlapping sub-sections, the most singnificant
of which are ‘Folk Songs’, ‘Songs of Love and Death’, ‘Songs of the
Springtime’ and a sequence of love-lyrics entitled ‘The Temple’. The folk-songs
mostly take the form of dramatic lyrics in which the speakers represent groups of
Indian folk plying their traditional occupations—e.g. ‘Palanquin-Bearers’,
‘Wandering Singers’, ‘Indian Weavers’ etc. Some of the pieces in a latter section
entitled ‘Indian Folk Songs’ follow a similar strategy. Here are also songs
celebrating traditional Indian mythology, legends and history which reveal the
poet’s catholicity of sympathy and secular outlook. A Hindu Brahmin domiciled
in Muslim Hyderabad, she sings of both Krishna and Allah and Radha and
Gulnar, with equal zest. Love is naturally one of her favourite subjects and her
handling of this age-old theme is marked by a variety of approach, mood, and
technique. While, in ‘A Rajput Love-song’, she recreates a dramatic situation
against a typical Rajasthani back-drop, in ‘A Love Song from the North’ and ‘A
Persian Love Song’, she employs the conventions of Hindi and Persian love
poetry, respectively. ‘The Temple’ is easily one of the most remarkable
sequences in Indian English poetry. Tracing the progress of love from ‘The Gate
of Delight’, through ‘The Path of Tears’, ultimately to ‘The Sanctuary’, where it
culminates in mystical self-surrender, it treats its subject with sensitivity and
charm. The true-blue romantic that she is, she also revels in the ‘pleasure of
being sad’ and designates herself an ‘unwilling priestess’ to the God of Pain,
performing his ‘inexorable rites’. ‘How shall I cherish thee,’ she asks, ‘O
precious pain?’ A mind like this needs must be ‘half in love with easeful death’.
Hence, like Emily Dickinson, 'the blind, ultimate silence of the dead’ and ‘the
mute and mystic terror of the tomb’ always fascinate her. In a weak moment, she
pleads with Death: ‘Tarry awhile, O Death, I cannot die/Till all my human
hungers are fulfilled’; but being deeply grounded in Hindu philosophy, she is
reassured by the thought that ‘Life is a prism’ of God’s light, and Death ‘the
shadow’ of His face. Her ‘Coromandel Fishers’ too refuse to panic when caught
in a sea-storm, because they believe that 'He who holds the storm by the hair will
hide in His breast our lives.’

The 'Songs of Springtime’ contain some of Sarojini Naidu’s most characteristic

work. Here she finds ‘the clue/To all the vernal joy’, which her response to the
colourful Indian scene with its gulmo ars and sirisas, champak and lotus buds,
and koels anddhadikulas evokes. Her nature poetry is lighted up by her zestful
and uninhibited joy in beauty, especially of spring, her favourite season. She
sings, ‘O let us fling all care away and lie alone and dream/’Neath tangled
boughs of tamarind and molsari andneem/And bind our brows with jasmine
sprays and play on carven flutes/To wake the slumbering serpent-kings among
the banyan roots.’ Like the Romantics, she regards Nature as a refuge from the
cares of human life, though unlike Wordsworth she is hardly a Nature-mystic.
Nor is a Keatsian, sensuous apprehension’of Nature her strong suit, though she
does evoke the tropical magnificence of the Indian landscape as in ‘The earth is
a fire like a humming-bird’s wing/And the sky like a king-fisher’s feather.* She
is at her weakest in her occasional and patriotic poems—all those songs, sonnets
and odes addressed to India, Tilak and the rest. These pieces seldom rise above
the level of commonplace sentiment and conventional expression and on the
whole ofTer flashy rhetoric rather than authentic poetry—a surprising feature of
the art of one whose patriotism was beyond question.

Sarojini Naidu’s finest lyrics have a perfect structure and an exquisite finish, and
she handles various metres and stanza- forms with consummate ease. To her, as
to Rilke, ‘singing was being.’ Of all the Indian English poets of her generation,
she has perhaps the finest ear and her mastery of,word-music is indubitable (e g.
the line: ‘The serpents are asleep among the poppies’). It is true that her diction
and imagery often run into conventional romantic grooves (her lines are
cluttered up with too many ‘golden lamps of hope” and ‘rapturous notes’, etc.)
but those who are tempted, on this account, to dismiss her entire work as a mere
carbon copy of British romanticism ignore her evocative and original use of
imagery drawn from the Indian scene (in her lyrics, night descends ‘like a black
panther from the caves of sleep’ and the white river is ‘curved like a tusk’)
which makes for unmistakable freshness.

The meagreness of her total poetic output after her early burst of song is one of
the mysteries of Sarojini Naidu’s poetic career and the reasons which brought
her poetic career to an untimely end are not yet clear. Perhaps, giving to public
life what could have gone to poetry, she failed to grow as an artist. Her verse, at
its worst, suffers from sentimentality and vagueness; and occasionally the
compulsions of rhyme appear to dictate terms to both emotion and logic. Her
weaker lyrics seem precariously poised on the brink of sloppiness, and she has
rightly been accused of much cloying sweetness and a lack of intellectual fibre.
A committed romantic, she denied herself all-sided self-expression. This
explains the curious fact that though she possessed a sharp wit and a fine comic
sense (of which even Mahatma Gandhi, whom she once campared to Micky
Mouse, was a victim) she nowhere allowed it to function in her poetry, which
remains totally denuded of the ‘high estate of laughter’.

By the standards of modern poetic taste, Sarojini Naidu’s work is bound to

appear hopelessly outdated; nevertheless, it remains both historically significant
and intrinsically important. By winning recognition in England, she brought
prestige to Indian English writing long before Tagore received the Nobel Prize;
and her best poetry is not just a faded echo of the feeble voice of decadent
romanticism, but an authentic Indian English lyric utterance exquisitely tuned to
the composite Indian ethos, bringing home to the unbiased reader all the
opulence, pageantry and charm of traditional Indian life, and the splendours of
the Indian scene.

Sarojini Naidu’s younger brother, Harindranath Chattopa- dhyaya (1898—) is a

poet also cast, though somewhat less rigidly, in the romantic mould. Far more
prolific than his better- known sister, he has, during the half-century between
1918 when his first collection of lyrics—The Feast of Youth—appeared and
Virgins and Vineyards (1967), published numerous volumes of verse, the more
significant of which are The Magic Tree (1922), Poems and Plays (1927) and
Spring in Winter (1955). Such fatal fecundity must result in unevenness, and
Chattopadhyaya’s better poems have been engulfed in a mass of middlings. He
is essentially a short distance runner, and his occasional attempts at the long
poem, like ‘The Garden of Isolation’, and the sonnet sequence ‘In Memoriam’ in
Poems and Plays are hardly successful. His themes are the staple of all romantic
poetry—nostalgia, melancholy, passion for beauty, the changing moods of love,
idealism and humanitarian compassion (which in his later verse takes on
Marxian overtones). Full of direct echoes from Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley,
Browning and Swinburne, his verse, unlike that of Sarojini Naidu, seems to find
an individual voice only occasionally. An accomplished metrist. he has a sure
command of rhythm and rhyme (when once challenged to find a rhyme for the
word ‘month’ which is supposed to have no word that rhymes with it, he came
out with: ‘This has been for me a very busy month/My work has gone up to ‘n’
plus oneth’).53Though capable of the singing note at will, he is, on the whole,
lessof a singer than his sister; but his style sometimes attains a greater
trenchancy than hers (e.g. ‘The rich responsibility of the seed/Full of some future
tree’) and unlike her he can also surprise us with a sudden Hash of wit, as when
he compares God and the self to two hands of the clock which meet ‘once in
every hour’; or hears Noon, the ‘Mystic dog’ utter ‘loud barks of light’.
Chattopadhyaya’s later verse has shed most of the early lushness and exuberance
and shows an increasing capacity for abstract thought and more controlled
expression. Unfortunately, he has not yet been able to organise these later
insights firmly enough to produce major poetry.

Of minor talent, Indian English poetry has indeed never felt a dearth. Among the
many practitioners of verse whose work began during this period was Swami
Vivekananda (1863-1902) whose collected poems appeared much later, in 1947.
For the ringing tones of his militant voice, however, the other harmony of prose
proved a far more effective medium. Joseph Furtado (1872-1947), author of
Poems (1901), A Goan Fiddler (1927), Songs in Exile (1938) and Selected
Poems (1942, rev. ed. 1967), was probably the first Indian English poet to use
pidgin English for comic purposes (e.g. ‘Sly rogue, the Old Irani/Has made a
lakh . . . /By mixing milk with pani'/ ‘Wouldn’t mind a little majah', etc.).
Among other writers of verse may be mentioned Raj Lakshi Debi (The Hindu
Wife or the Enchanted Fruit, 1876), Jitendra Mohun Tagoie (Flights of Fancy,
1881), T. Ramakrishna (Tales of Ind and other Poems, 1896); Nizamat Jung
(Sonnets, 1917; Islamic Poems, 1935; Poems, 1954), A.M. Modi (Spring
Blossoms, 1919); Ananda Acharya (Snow-birds, 1919; Arctic Swallows, 1927;
Samadhi Poems and Autumn Rains, 1956); Roby Dutta (Echoes from East and
West, 1909; Poems, 1915); R.B. Paymaster (Navroziana or the Dawn of a New
Era, 1917); P. Seshadri (Sonnets, 1914;Champak Leaves, 1923; In the Temple of
Truth, 1925); A.F. Khabardar (The Silken Tassel, 1918); N.V. Thadani (The
Triumph of Delhi and other Poems, 1916;' Krishna’s Flute and Other Poems,
1919; He Walked Alone, 1948); and M.B. Pithawalla (Sacred Sparks, 192Q;
Links with the Past, 1933).
Prose
The Indian renaissance of the nineteeth century produced prose of many types of
which, as in the earlier period, the two most prominent were historical-political
and religious-cultural prose; and understandably, what was earlier only a thin
trickle has by now become a steady and even flow. The prose was prompted by
the twofold impulse of the re-discovery of the Indian past and a strong
awareness of the problems of the day. Biography, autobiography, belles-lettres
and criticism still remain areas comparatively sparsely cultivated.

Prose of Thought:

As in the earlier period, Bengal and Bombay continue to dominate the scene,
though now, at least in the beginning, Bombay, the birth-place of the Indian
National Congress, leads the field. Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917),‘The Grand
Old Man of India’, was one of the earliest in a long line of freedom-fighters who
shaped Indian history before Independence.

A founder- member of the London Indian Society, Member of the Royal

Commission and Member of the British House of Commons, Dadabhai Naoroji
bearded the British lion in its own den. In his Poverty of India (Parts I & II,
1873) and Poverty and UnBritish Rule in India (1901), the burden of his
argument is that British administrative and economic policies are undermining
the real interests of India which can only be properly served by giving Indians
fair representation in the government of their own country. His numerous
speeches have been collected in Essays, Speeches, Addresses and Writings
(1887) and Speeches and Writings (1916). The contrast between his Address as
President of the second session of the Indian National Congress held in Calcutta
in 1886 and his Address at the twentysecond session held at the same place in
1906 reveals the change that came over his political thinking during the span of a
generation. In the earlier Address he had observed, ‘The people of England were
sincere in their declaration made more than half a century ago that India was a
sacred charge entrusted to their care by Providence, and that they were bound to
administer for the good of India, to the glory of their own name, and the
satisfaction of God.’ In the later speech he declared, ‘The British people would
not allow themselves to be subjected for a single day to such an unnatural system
of government as the one which had been imposed upon India for nearly a
century and a half... Self-government is the only and chief remedy.’
Two of Dadabhai Naoroji’s most illustrious pupils at the Elphinstone Institute,
where he taught early in his career, were V.N. Mandlik and R.G. Bhandarkar.
Vishwanath Narayan Mandlik (1833-89), a leading lawyer and a stickler for
punctuality (once when he had to appear in a murder case in Poona but missed
the train, he is said to have ordered a special train and reached his destination in
time) he was a nominated member of both the Bombay Legislative Council and
the Imperial Legislative Council in Calcutta. He founded and edited the weekly
Native Opinion (1864-71) and wrote a standard manual of Hindu Law (1867).
His Writings and Speeches were edited by N.V. Mandlik- in 1896. Ramakrishna
Gopal Bhandarkar (1837-1925), the ‘Nestor of Indologists’ in whose name the
Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute was founded in 1917, was one of the
greatest orientalists of his age, besides being a leading religious and social
reformer and educationist. While his Report on the Search for Sanskrit
Manuscripts (6 vols, 1879-91) is a monumental collection of source material, his
Early History of the Deccan (1884) and A Peep into the Early History of
India(1890) are the earliest significant works on Indian history by an Indian. His
Vaisnavism, Saivism and Minor Religious Systemsappeared in 1913, and his
Collected Works (4 volumes) in 1927-33.

Hailed as ‘Rishi Ranade’ by Srinivasa Sastri, Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842-

1901) was a gentle colossus of the late nineteenth century. A scholar with
virtually encyclopaedic interests, he was a patriot, a social and religious reformer
and a thinker, who deeply influenced the intellectual life of his age. His Rise of
the Maratha Power (1900) is, like Bhandarkar’s histories, a pioneering effort
which laid the foundations of historical research in Maharashtra. Making use, for
the first time, of Maratha chronicles, it sought to link firmly the rise of the
Marathas with the social and religious resurgence in Maharashtra during the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and also boldly rehabilitated Shivaji. The only
other work of Ranade published in his own lifejtime was Essays in Indian
Economics (1898) which amply justifies his description as the 'Father of Indian
Economics’. Three collections of his speeches and writings published later are
Religious and Social Reform (1902),Miscellaneous Writings (1915), and The
Wisdom of a ModernRishi (1942). Deeply grounded in the Hindu tradition,
Ranade’s mind had, at the same time, been enriched by avid study of modern
western thought; and it is this synthesis of the East and the West that is the chief
characteristic of his world view. A theist in religion, a moderate in politics and a
liberal in social thought, he 'brought back life to Maharashtra, which had become
a cold lump of flesh and bones’, as Tilak, who had often crossed swords with
him, said in a well-known obituary notice in Marathi in the Kesari. Another
eminent judge, like Ranade, Badruddin Tyabji (1844-1906), was a Moderate
leader, who presided over the third session of the Indian National Congress in
1887. An enlightened Muslim, he advocated national integration which, he
declared, did not militate against the preservation of Muslim values. There are
copious extracts from his speeches and writings in his Life by G.A. Natesan
(n.d.). In bis brief career, Kashinath Trim buck Telang (1850-93) crowded much
hectic activity in diverse fields such as law, journalism, politics, social reform,
education, orientology and the development of vernacular literature. A founder-
member of the Indian National Congress and the first Indian Vice-Chancellor of
the University of Bombay, Telang was one of the most effective public speakers
of his day. On his speech on the Revenue Jurisdiction Bill at a public meeting in
Bombay in 1876, the editor of the Bombay Gazette made the comment: ‘No
Englishman can appreciate the flexibility of the .English language till he had
heard it spoken by an educated and naturally clever native of India.’64' Of his
Select Writings and Speeches (2 vols. n.d.), the most outstanding are the essays
on the Ramayana and the Bhagavadgita in which Telang establishes the antiquity
of these Hindu scriptures and refutes the charge that they had borrowed certain
elements from Greek and Christian writings. A fellow jurist, N G. Chandavarkar
(1855-1923) was a Moderate Congress leader and a social reformer. More
interesting than his Speeches and Writing? (ed. L.V. Kaikini, 1911) is his
autobiography, A Wrestling Soul (1955). Two prominent Parsi contemporaries
of Ranade were Sir Pherozeshah Merwanjee Mehta (1845-1915) and Sir Dinsha
Edulji Wacha (1844-1936). ‘Ferocious Mehta’, an imperious personality, was
the ‘uncrowned king of Bombay’ for well over a generation. In politics,
however, his role was that of a gentle Moderate, like Ranade. ‘I accept British
rule, as Ranade did, as a dispensation so' wonderful . . . that it would be folly not
to accept it as a declaration of God’s will,’ he said in his address as Chairman of
the Reception Committee of the twentieth session of the Indian National
Congress held in Bombay in 1904. His Speeches and Writings appeared in 1906,
and Some Unpublished and Latest Speeches and Writings edited by J.R.V.
Jeejeebhai in 1918. In Mehta’s case, as in Dr. Johnson’s, the man was greater
than his works. Wacha, though older by an year, played the second Addle to
Mehta. Though hardly as powerful a speaker as Sir Pherozeshah, he was as
active in politics and civic affairs and was a more copious writer. Apart from
biographies of Premchund Roychund (1913) and J.N. Tata (1914) he wrote a
volume of reminiscences, Shells from the Sands of Bombay: being my
recollections and reminiscences(1360-75) (1920). His Speeches and Writings
were published by Natesan, Madras (n.d.).
The era of moderate politics ended with the rise of Bal Gangadhar
(‘Lokamanya’=revered by the people) Tilak (1856*1920), the ‘father of the
Indian unrest’. Infusing a new spirit of militancy into Congress activities, he
drew the lower middle class into the freedom struggle. His English speeches,
collected in Writings and Speeches (1922) and Towards Independence. Samagra
Lokamanya Tilak, Vol. VII (1975) reveal a rugged, aggressive and blunt
personality, disdaining stylistic graces and relying exclusively on unvarnished
logic, forthright argument ard precise and clear presentation in expressing itself.
The other side of Tilak—the erudite scholar and Indologist—is revealed in The
Orion: Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas (1893) and The Arctic Home
of the Vedas (1903). Though his attempts here to stretch the date of the Vedas
back to mid- fifth century B.C. have not received support from modern scholars,
these are certainly no amateurish efforts, Tilak’s learning being beyond cavil.
His Gitarahasya (1915; English translation, 1935), a boldly activist interpretation
of the Bhagavadgita was written in Marathi. Tilak’s lieutenant, N.C. Kelkar
(1872-1947) lacked both his master’s virility and his charisma, but had a better
appreciation of aesthetic values as seen in his writings collected and edited by
his son, K.N. Kelkar in Pleasures and Privileges of the Pen (1929).

Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915), Tilak’s younger contemporary, was the

ablest disciple of Ranade and was acknowledged by Gandhi as his political guru.
His Speeches (1908; 1916) and Speeches and Writings: 3 Vols, (1962) are
characteristic of an earnest and upright, and gentle and cultured soul, wholly
dedicated to his country’s cause. His ideal is summed up in the following words
from the Manifesto of the Servants of India Society, which he founded in 1905:
‘Public life must be spiritualized. Love of country must so fill the heart that all
else shall appear as of little moment by its side.’ A Moderate in politics, Gokhale
believed in negotiation and compromise, adjustment and persuasion and set for
himself heroically high standards of probity. His prodigious memory, patient
industry, careful preparation, balanced and fair presentation, sweet
reasonableness in argument and mellifluous voice together made him an
outstanding speaker. Lord Curzon, speaking in the House of Lords after
Gokhale’s death declared that 'the Indian statesman would have obtained a
position of distinction in any parliament in the world, even in the House of
Commons.’ H.A. Fisher found his use of English 'exact and brilliant and entirely
free from the redundancy and magniloquence which is sometimes imputed to
Indian eloquence.’

In Bengal, the editorship of the Hindoo Patriot came after the death of Hurish
Chunder Mukherji in I860 to Kristo Das Pal (1834-84), who headed the paper
with great distinction for almost a quarter century. Writing in Concord in 1887,
G.A. Stacks, editor of the Calcutta Review observed, ‘The old race of native
writers who were masters of pure, polished and idiomatic English appears to
have died out with- K.D. Pal ’* According to the Englishman, ‘as a speaker he
stood far ahead of any of his countrymen, and his utterances were in many
respects superior even to those of his colleagues whose mother- tongue was
English, and whose training had been entirely British.’88 His Speeches and
Minutes 1867-1881, edited by Ramchandra Palit, were published in 1882.
Keshub Chunder Sen (1838-84), under whose energetic leadership the Brahmo
Samaj movement spead (but also split later), started the fortnightly, Indian
Mirror, in 1861. An impressive public speaker, he lectured widely, mostly on
religious subjects, both in India and England. His lectures, models of Victorian
rhetoric, have been published in Lectures in India (1901); The New Dispensation
or The Religion of Harmony, (Vol. I, 1903, Vol. II, 1910); and Discourses and
Writings (1904). Sen emphasized the essential unity of all religions (‘The
grammar of modern theology must be condemned by every scientific man as bad
grammar. It makes no mention of the copulative conjunction. The disjunctive
‘‘or” reigns supreme, the copulative “and” finds no place’) and the need for
social reform in India. His message is, ‘India, absorb England! Asia, assimilate
Christian Europe.’

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-94), renowned Bengali novelist and author of

one of the earliest Indian English novels, wrote several essays in English,
including ‘On the origin of Hindu Festivals’ (1870), ‘Bengali Literature’ (1871),
‘The Study of Hindu Philosophy’ (1873) and ‘Vedic Literature’ (1894). His
spirited defence of Hinduism in Letters on Hinduism appeared in print in 1940,
long after his death. Womesh Chunder Bonner- jee (1844-1906?), first president
of the Indian National Congress (1885), established the London India Society in
1865, which later merged into the East Indian Association. His speeches are
collected inLife, Letters and Speeches of W.C. Bonnerjee (1923) edited by K.L.
Bandopadhyaya. Of the three notable Ghoshes of the period (apart from
Manmohan Ghose and Sri Aurodindo) Rashbihari Ghosh (1845-1921) and
Lalmohan Ghosh (1849-1909) were Moderate Congress leaders. In his Welcome
Address at the Calcutta Congress of 1908, Rashbihari declared that England
‘came not as a conqueror but as a deliverer with the ready acquiescence of the
pebple to heal and settle, to substitute order and good government for disorder
and anarchy.’ His Speeches were published in 1919 and Lalmohan’s (2 vols.) in
1883-84. Motilal Ghosh (1847-1902) founded the well-known newspaper, Amrit
Bazar Patrika in 1868. His Speeches and Writings appeared in 1935. Another
Moderate Bengali leader, Ambica Charan Mazumdar (1850-1922) wrote Indian
National Evolution—A Brief Survey of the Origin and Progress of the Indian
National Congress (1915).

Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909), whose poetry has already been considered,
was an administrator with wide experience. Keenly aware of the political and
economic problems of India, he brought his vast knowledge and experience to
bear upon them in scholarly studies like The Peasantry of Bengal (1875), A
History of Civilization in Ancient India (3 Vols:1889), Famine and Land
Assessment in India (1900) and The Economic History of India (2 Vols, 1902
and 1904), which has been hailed as ‘the first history of a colonial regime
written from the point of view of the subject of a colonial empire. It contains, in
essence, a preview of what came later to be called the economics of
colonialism.’5* Dutt’s topics are ably researched, his analysis acute and his
presentation well-documented; and he shows a remarkable forthrightness in the
expression of his views. In criticizing British policies, he declares, ‘I cannot and
will not put fetters on my tongue.’ Dutt is also a pioneer in both the literature of
travel and literary history. In fact, his first published work was Three Years in
Europe: 1869-1871 (1872, revised and enlarged ed., 1895), a travelogue marked
by a keen sense of place and an eye for picturesque detail. Rambles in India:
1871-95 (1895) employs a similar strategy. His The Literature of Bengal (1879,
rev. ed. 1895) is a survey, the concluding chapter of which (‘General Intellectual
Progress in the Nineteenth Century’) is one of the earliest notable attempts
toassess the impact of western ideas on Indian life and thought.

Dutt had a burning passion to achieve something worthwhile in his lifetime; a

line he often used to quote was: ‘life isn’t a game; once lost, we play again’.*0
In spite of his own misgivings about writing in English, Dutt’s pioneering efforts
in several genres prove that he did not altogether fail his ideal. Dutt’s friend,
Surendranath Banerjea (1848-1925) was acclaimed by his age as perhaps its
most powerful orator in English. Dismissed from the Indian Civil Service for a
technical breach of administrative norms, he realized that he had suffered
because ‘I was an Indian, a member of a community that lay disorganized, had
no public opinion and no voice in the councils of their Government’; and
pledged himself to the political uplift of his people. He convened the first
National Conference in 1883, which became the forerunner of the Indian
National Congress. One of the founding fathers of the Congress, he presided
twice over its deliberations and was an outstanding moderate leader eclipsed
only with the rise of Gandhi. His Speeches 1880-1908 (6 vols., 1890-1908) and
The Trumpet Voice of India: Speeches of Babu Surendranath Banerjea,
Delivered in England in 1909 (1919) declared ‘self-government within the
empire as our goal and constitutional and lawful methods as the only means for
its attainment’. In his autobiography, A Nation in Making: Being the
reminiscences of fifty years of public life (1925), he claims ‘to have had a high
patriotic purpose’, viz. to trace the growth of the national movement and to do
justice to the early builders of the nation. More of a public than a private
document, A Motion in Making is an apologia for Moderate politics Though
often long-winded and magniloquent (his Presidential speeches at the Congress
Sessions at Poona (1895) and Ahmedabad (1902) run to 91 and 106 pages
respectively), at his best Surendranath Banerjea was a master of the impassioned
utterance. Another Bengali leader who faded away after the rise of Gandhi was
Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932) of the once celebrated radical trio called ‘Lal-
Bal-Pal (i.e. Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and B.C. Pal). He wrote both
on politics (Nationality and Empire, 1916; Indian Nationalism: Its Principles and
Personalities. 1919) and religion (Introduction to the Study of Hinduism, 1908).
The two volumes of his Memoirs of My Life and Times appeared in 1932 and
1951 respectively, and a collection of his writings and speeches in 1958. Pal’s
younger contemporary, Chittaranjan Das (1870-1925), obeying what was almost
an unwritten law of the age, plunged into the freedom struggle and created so
strong an impact that he came to be known as ‘Deshabandhu’ (friend of the
nation). He wrote both lyrical verse and prose in Bengali; his English orations
(Speeches) were published in 1918.

It was another trio—this time a purely Bengali one—which produced the most
noteworthy prose of the period. It comprises Rabindranath Tagore, Swami
Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. As in the case of his verse, Rabindranath’s
career as a writer of English prose began years after he had already established a
name in his mother tongue. Here again, a firm distinction must be made between
his prose writings in Bengali translated by others into English and those written
originally in English or translated into English by Tagore himself. The
autobiographical works, My Boyhood Days and Reminiscences, belong to the
first category and have therefore no place in this survey. Tagore’s prose writings
in English were delivered as lectures. The earliest was Sadhana (1913) (not to be
confused with the Bengali journal by the same name which was brought out
from 1891 to 1895). In these lectures delivered at Harvard University in the year
in which he was to win the Nobel Prize for literature, we have a clear
formulation of Tagore’s philosophical position. He begins with a consideration
of the relation of the individual to the universe; discusses the age-old problem of
evil, and indicates the way to the realization of the Infinite, through intermediate
stages such as realization in love, in action and realization of beauty. Tagore
ends with a reiteration of the noo-dualistic faith: ‘Thou dwellest in me and I in
Thee’. Most of the Sadhana lectures were ‘either adaptations or elaborations of
his earlier Bengali work, Dharma and the Santiniketan sermons.’

A conducted lecture-tour in the U.S.A. in 1916 yielded two more collections of

speeches: Personality (1917) and Nationalism (1917). Personality touches on
various subjects including the relationship between Man and Art, Man and
Woman, Man and Nature and Man and God; and Tagore’s educational ideas are
expressed in the lecture, ‘My School’. As in Sadhana, Tagore’s basic position
here also is non-dualistic: ‘The one cry of the personal man has been to know the
Supreme Person.* In Nationalism, the three points of reference are the West,
Japan and India respectively. Tagore makes a distinction between society (a
‘spontaneous self-expression of man as a social being’) and nation (a ‘political
and economic union of people’) and argues that before the British conquest
Indian social life functioned undisturbed by political changes. The imperialistic
‘nationalism’

Of the West has destroyed this fabric by ruthless political suppression and
economic exploitation of the land. Predatory nationalism has given Western man
mental and material power at the cost of inoral strength, and is sure to destroy
itself one day. Hence both Japan and India must guard against the temptation to
ape the West in the name of modernization; for ‘true modernism is freedom of
mind, not slavery of taste.’ Tagore’s warning to Japan not to 'lose her own soul’
while learning from the West (which did not exactly endear him to that country
then) was proved prophetic by the Second World War. For Tagore, the real
problem of India is not political but social: ‘Let our civilization take its firm
stand upon its basis of social co-operation and not upon that of economic
exploitation and conflict.* Nationalism sparkles with some of Tagore’s most
eloquent prose when he denounces western imperialism and its dangers. The ten
lectures collected in Creative Unity (1922) do not add much by way of subject-
matter or ideas, with the exception of a perceptive analysis of the East-West
relationship in the essay. ‘East and West’. Tagore argues that the real reason
why ‘the tvain’ do not meet is because the West ‘has not sent out its humanity to
meet the man in the East, but only its machine.’

The Religion of Man (1930) comprises the Hibbert lectures delivered in Oxford
at Manchester College in May 1930. The chief theme here. is ‘the idea of the
humanity of our God or the divinity of Man, the Eternal’. 'My religion’, Tagore
declares, ‘is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the universal
human spirit, in my own individual being.' While Tagore here again mainly
restates the Vedio-Upanishadic position, the most interesting portions of the
book are the autobiographical passages in which he traces the growth of his own
religious opinions, characterizing his religion as ‘a poet’s religion’, and talks
about his educational thinking which led to the establishment of Santiniketan.

Man comprises two lectures delivered at the Andhra University, Waltair in 1937.
These somewhat loosely argued discourses by the ageing writer touch upon
various issues including the basic duality of man’s nature, the essential unity of
all religions, the advaita doctrine and the distinct hope of the arrival of the
Supreme Man. The same note of hope was struck in Tagore’s last public
utterance in prose, Crisis in Civilization (1941) which was translated from his
Bengali original, Sabhyatar Sankat. Tagore’s prose in English reveals him as an
internationalist and a humanist preaching the gospel of universal harmony
between Man and Man, Man and Nature, and Man and the Divine. While his
thought, which has its sources in the Upanishads, the Gita, Buddhism, and
Vaishnavism, is clearly derivative, there is an unmistakable ring of personal
conviction in his words. They spring from a mind to which these age-old
thoughts are not merely traditional truisms learnt by rote but living truths felt in
the 6lood. Tagore’s prose is remarkable less for qualities of precision and logical
argumentation than for its frequent spells of impassioned, semi-poetic utterance.

Firmly grounded, like Tagore, in the Indian ethos, Swami Vivekananda (1863-
1902) spoke with less charm and poetry but with more virility. Born Narendra
Datta, Swami Vivekananda came under the spell of the noted mystic,
Ramakrishna Parama- hansa at the age of eighteen. Blessed, initiated and trained
by him, Vivekananda founded, after his master’s death, the Ramakrishna order
of monks in 1886. His wanderings all over India during 1888*1892 and what he
observed of the misery and degradation around him, confirmed him in his sense
of mission. In December 1892, he spent three days in meditation on a rock off
the coast at Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of India (the spot where the
Vivekananda memorial stands now). He is said to have had a spiritual
experience here, during which he was bidden to take India’s message to the West
and to work for the uplift of bis motherland. Sailing for the U.S. A. in May 1893,
he attended the Parliament of Religions at Chicago. Here, in the Art Institute
Building, on Monday, 11 September, 1893, at the fag end of the day and after
repeated requests from the chairman, Vivekananda rose to make a brief,
extempore speech (unlike the other delegates who delivered prepared addresses)
beginning with the historic words, ‘Sisters and brothers of America’. In the
words of Romain Rolland, it ‘was like a tongue of flame. Among the grey
wastes, of cold dissertation it firjd the souls of the listening throng. When he
woke up next morning, the obscure Indian monk found himself a celebrity. For
the next three years, this ‘Hindu hurricane’ as the Americans described him,
overran practically the entire United States, spreading the message of Hinduism;
and later, lectured in England also, before returning to India in 1897. After
another whirlwind tour from Colombo in the south, to Almora in the north, he
established in 1898 the wellknown Ramakrishna Math at Belur, where he died in
1902. Vivekananda was a man with a two-fold mission. He wished to bring
home to the West the true nature of Hinduism (‘I have a message to the West as
Buddha had a message to the East,’ he said); and he aspired to work for the
uplift of India. His Complete Works (Vols. I to VIII, 1907-1951) mostly consist
of the spoken word. [Selections from Swami Vivekananda (1944; rev. ed., 1975)
is a representative anthology). In his lectures abroad, Vivekananda stresses the
essential unity of all religions and the need to eschew sectarianism and
fanaticism, and looks forward to the day when ‘great men shall arise and cast off
these kindergartens of religion and make vivid and powerful the true religion,
the worship of the Spirit by the Spirit.’ He finds this universal faith in AAwaita
Vedanta, which for him is ‘the most scientific religion’ and ‘the fairest flower of
philosophy and religion’ in the world. He also elucidates the principles of Jnana,
Karma, Bhakti and Raja yogas. Bold as his message to the west is, that to his
own countrymen is ‘bolder still’. The burden of his lectures in India is the
current degradation of the country, and its causes and cure. The principal causes
according to him are the fossilization of its thought-processes as a result of
India’s medieval insularity; superstition and obscurantism (‘Our religion is in the
kitchen, our God is in the cooking pot and our religion is, “Don’t touch me, I am
holy.’’ ’); the devaluation in the status of woman; bad education, and the
crippling diffidence of the modern Hindu Vivekananda advocates, a clear-cut
programme of reform: India must rediscover her true religion, Adwaita in its
pristine purity.

She must steer clear of both the Scylla of old superstitions and meaningless
taboos of orthodoxy and the Charybdis of modern European materialism.
Shedding all their diffidence, Indians must stand forth, strong and self-reliant.
'What we want is muscles of iron and nerves of steel’; ‘Behold and fear not... We
have to become Abhih, fearless’; we must ‘work, this is the time.. .for life is
short.’ Indulging merely in carping criticism is a negative attitude. ‘The time has
come for the re-building, the re-constructing. . . . The house has been cleansed;
let it be inhabited anew. The road has been cleared. March ahead, children of the
Aryas.’ The name ‘Hindu’ is now a term of opprobrium; we must make it ‘the
highest word that any language can invent.’ Our women, now weak, passive and
dormant, must be given their rightful place in society and our present-day
education which is entirely soulless must be. made a ‘manmaking’, ,‘life-
building’ education. It must be on ‘national lines’ and 'through national methods
as far as practical.’ Resurgent India has a great mission: ‘Once more the world
must be conquered by India. This is the dream of my life, he declared.' In more
than one lecture he tells his countrymen, 'Arise, awake and stop not till the goal
is reached.’

Most of Vivekananda’s speeches were delivered extempore, and not a little of

their appeal was derived from his dominant personality which exuded a sense of
both tranquillity and power. His principal assets were his large glowing eyes, the
spontaneity and sincerity of his utterance, his low, earnest delivery which made
his words singularly impressive, and his voice ‘rich as a bronze bell’* and ‘grave
without violent contrasts but with deep vibrations that filled both hall and hearts
’ Vivekananda’s thought can hardly be said to be strikingly original, its sources
being clearly in the Hindu religious and philosophical tradition. He also claimed
that in all he spoke he was inspired by his master. But as in the case of Tagore,
the reader gets an unmistakable impression that the traditional message is being
rediscovered by one who has actually lived his life in its effulgence.

Vivekananda’s scholarship is sound, his argument generally logical and precise,

and his style athletic and forceful. Though it has a striking rhetorical power, it
carries no trace of any straining after effect. ‘My ideal of language’, he once
said, ‘is my master’s language, most colloquial and yet most expressive.” Like
all great religious teachers he makes apt use of story and parable and a
noteworthy feature is his use of analogies drawn from science, as when he
compares the struggle of the individual soul to attain union with the Divine with
that of a bubble of air in a glass of water to join the mass of air outside. Above
all, the fact that the force of Vivekananda’s words comes through after three
quarters of a century after his death shows that his speeches continue to pulsate
with life, though much water has flowed down the Ganga since that day in July
1902 when his mortal remains were consigned to the flames at Belur Math.
Perhaps the most effective interpreter of Indian thought to the world,
Vivekananda is a prophet with an imperishable -message to his own countrymen.
Unlike the spoken word of Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo who, early in his
career, had come under the Swami’s influence, produced an enormous and
varied mass of prose writings on religious, metaphysical, occult, social, political,
cultural and literary subjects. His earliest prose writings were a series of
anonymous contributions to the Bombay journal, Induprakash Induprakash94,
entitled ‘New Lamps for Old’. These nine essays are fiery political propaganda,
advocating the kind of radical politics to which Sri Aurobindo subscribed in his
youth. The series of articles on Bankimchandra Chatterjee also published in the
Induprakash in 1894 represent his earliest notable attempt at literary criticism.
Of his writings during 1902 and 1906 when his political work was carried on in
secret, only Bhavani Mandir survives. This is a fervent celebration of the
feminine principle incarnate as Goddess Bhavani. The unsigned articles in the
Bande Mataram in 1906 also deal with current politics. After his acquittal in the
Alipore conspiracy case in 1909, Sri Aurobindo started the Karmayogin, ‘a
weekly review of national Religion, Literature, Science, Philosophy etc.’, which
ran for one year. Prominent among the essays to appear here were ‘A System of

National Education’, and ’The National Value of Art’. Soon after his arrival at
Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo founded the monthly Arya (1914-21), in which
most of his later prose writings initially appeared. The Arya aimed at presenting
‘asynthetic philosophy which might be a contribution to the thought of the new
age that is coming upon us.’ The .variousseries of essays first published here and
subsequently issued in book form broadly cover three areas: Religion and
metaphysics, social, cultural and political issues and literary criticism. To the
first category belong works such as Essays on the Gita(1928), The Life Divine
(1939-40), Heraclitus (1941) and The Synthesis of Yoga (1948). Unlike some
other noted commentators, Sri Aurobindo does cot attempt a new interpretation
in his Essays on the Gita. He tries to recapture the ‘essential and living message’
of the Gita, ‘that in it which humanity has toseize for its perfection and its
highest spiritual welfare.’ Nevertheless, his characterization of the triune
(knowledge-devotion- works) way of the Gita as the means by which one can
rise outof one’s lower into one’s ’supreme spiritual nature’ is in keeping with his
world-view in The Life Divine. Heraclitus is an illuminating comparative study
of the Greek philosopher and Vedic-Upanishadic thought.

The Life Divine is easily the crown of Sri Aurobindo's writings in prose. This
massive treatise of more than a thousand pages has for its central theme ’the
affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal
existence.’ It argues that man’s highest aim is the manifestation of the divine in
himself and the realization of God within and without. Human existence is a sort
of refraction of the divine existence in inverted order of ascent and descent. The
Divine descends from pure Existence through the play of Consciousness-Force
and Bliss and the creative medium of Supermind into cosmic being. Man
ascends from Matter through a developing life, soul and mind and the
illuminating medium of Supermind towards the divine being. The knot of the
two, the higher and the lower hemispheres, is where mind and supermind meet
with a veil between them. ’The rending of the veil is the condition of the divine
life in humanity; for by that rending, by the illuminating descent of the higher
into the nature of the lower being, and the forceful ascent of the lower being into
the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-
comprehending supermind, the soul realize its divine self in the all- possessing,
all-blissful Ananda, life re-possess its divine power in the play of omnipotent
Consciousness-Force, and Matter open toits divine liberty as a form of divine
Existence.’ The goal of human evolution, according to Sri Aurobindo, is
‘fullness of being, fullness of consciousness, fullness of life.’ Human evolution‘
must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and
self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true
power of itself in Nature which isto us still a Super nature.’ The Life Divine is
an ambitious metaphysical statement the sheer magnitude of which appears to be
as forbidding as the abstruseness of its frequently repetitive argument. Yet, in its
vastness of conception, the sweep of itsintricate thought-structure, its penetrating
vision, its bold insights and the uniform dignity and elevation of its style it has
no equal in the history of Indian English prose. The Synthesis of Yoga, even
longer than The Life Divine, is a complementary work, expounding in detail the
strategy to be employed in achieving the goal set forth in the previous work.
More practical in spirit than The Life Divine. The Synthesis of Yoga considers
the existing systems of Yoga advocated by various thinkers in the past, notes the
advantages and difficulties of each, and advocates an ‘Integral Yoga’, which
radically differs from all these. While each of them involved the individual’s
ascent to the world of the spirit leading to personal salvation, ‘integral yoga’
aims at ascent to the Supermind only to make it descend to this earth for the
salvation, not of an individual but of the entire human race.

The series of essays on cultural, social and political issues published serially in
the Aiya have been collected in The Renaissance in India (1920), The
Foundations of Indian Culture (1953), The Human Cycle (originally entitled The
Psychology of Social Development) (1949), The Idea! of Human Unity (1919;
revised ed. 1950) and War and Self-determination Cl920; revised ed. 1962).
While Foundations of Indian Culture is a spirited defence of the Indian tradition
against the amateurish attack by William Archer in India and the Future (1917),
The Renaissance in India is one of the most perceptive analyses of the nature of
the Indian resurgence in the nineteenth century. In The Human Cycle Sri
Aurobindo traces the evolution of social man from barbarism to the present
rationalist state of civilization and posits a ‘society founded upon spirituality’ in
future. The Ideal of Human Unity and War and Self-determination were written
at the time of the first World War. After exposing the inadequacies of the then
current notions of state, nation and empire, Sri Aurobindo emphasizes the ‘the
necessity and inevitability of some kind of world-union ... a federationof free
nationalities.’

The Arya essays on literary criticism have been collected in The Future Poetry
(1953) to which Sri Aurobindo’s letters on poetry, literature and art were added
in the Centenary Library Edition (Vol. IX, 1971). The questions discussed here
are the nature, constituents and techniques of poetry, the spirit and the
development of British poetry, assessment of individual poets, and Sri
Aurobindo’s idea of the poetry of the future as the ‘mantra’ or ‘self-effective
language’. The most remarkable feature of Sri Aurobindo’s literary criticism is
that he studies poetry in general and British poetry in particular, not by
employing second-hand tools borrowed from Western critics— the bane of much
Indian English criticism, but as one steeped in ancient Indian literature and
aesthetics and at the same time at home with the European tradition as well. This
enables him to adopt a comparative approach and makes his survey of British
poetry refreshingly original. His ideal of poetry is, by and large, in tune with the
romantic one, and his defence of English classical metres is unlikely to receive
wide support. He also appears to be mostly unaware of the poetic revolution
ushered in by Eliot and the later Yeats. (In one of his letters, he declares as late
as 1943 that contemporary English poetry ‘has not yet produced anything very
decisive, great or successful.’66 But his taste is catholic enough to make him
eulogize Whitman as ‘the most Homeric voice since Homer.’ With all its
limitations, The Future Poetry remainsfan impres

sive achievement in an area where the paucity of excellence is painfully evident.

Sri Aurobindo’s numerous other letters on diverse topics ranging from religion
to science and literature to Ashram life have been collected in many volumes.
The short poetic essay, The Mother (1928), celebrating the ‘divine Conscious
Force that dominates all existence* in her four forms representing ‘Wisdom,
Strength, Harmony and Perfection’ is notable for its lyrical fervour. The last of
Sri Aurobindo’s prose writings, eight essays entitled The Supramental
Manifestation, first appeared in the Quarterly, Bulletin of Physical Education, in
1949-50. There are also a host of other essays on Sanskrit, Greek and Bengali
literature, translations, speeches notes and aphorisms now brought together ip
the exhaustive Birth Centenary Library Edition. Sri Aurobindo’s style is Protean
and shows itself capable of diverse tones and effects such as irony and satcasm
in the New Lamps for Old and Bande Mataram essays, forensic skill in The
Renaissance in India, elevation in The Life Divine and even playful banter in
some of his letters to his disciples. In sheer amplitude and variety Sri Aurobindo
has no equal among writers of Indian English prose. As compared to the
Bombay and Bengal presidencies, northIndia produced fewer figures of national
stature during thisperiod. Among the most outstanding were Pandit Madan
Mohan Malaviya (1861-1946), Motilal Nehru (1861-1931), and Lala Lajpat Rai
(1865-1928). Malaviya, twice president of the Indian National Congress (1909
and 1916) was an oriental scholarwith distinct orthodox leanings, which made
him a Hindu Mahasabha leader later His speeches have been collected in
Speeches and Writings (1919). Motilal Nehru, over shadowed by his illustrious
son, Jawaharlal, was a prominent leader of the Swarajya Party. A selection of his
speeches has appeared under the title, A Voice of Freedom (1961) edited by
K.M.Panikkar and A. Pershad. Lala Lajpat Rai, the last of the celebrated trio
Lal-Bal-Pal to be considered, was one of thegreatest leaders of the Punjab. A
public worker with an inclusive vision, he espoused several causes such as
politicale mancipation, religious, social and educational reform and socialism (of
which he was one of the pioneers in India). He founded and edited the English
paper, The People, and wrote several books including Young Indip (1917), and
The Political Future of India (1918). His The United States of America: A
Hindu's Impressions and a Study (1916) is an interesting account of his sojourn
in the U.S.A., where he picked up his socialist ideas. Muslim political thought
from North India is represented by Syed Ahmed Khan (1817-98), whose role in
the reawakening of his people has already been considered. His Causes of the
Indian Revolt (1858) was translated into English by Colvin and Graham in 1873
and his Writings and Speeches were edited by Shan Mohammed in 1972. In
contrast with Badruddin Tyabji, the Moderate leader from Bombay, Syed
Ahmed Khan, argued that the interests of the Muslims would be best served by
remaining aloof from the Indian National Congress. Ameer Ali (1849-1928),
author of The Spirit of Islam (1891) and A Short History of the Saracens (1916)
was the first Indian Muslim to become a High Court Judge and member of the
British Privy Council. He advocated a rediscovery of the basic principles of
Islam and its former glory.
In the South, the first noteworthy name is that of Maharaja Sir Rama Varma of
Travancore (1837-84), one of the earliest of enlightened Indian princes.
Interested in the study of science, history and literature, he wrote both in
Malayalam and English. A frequent contributor to the Madras Athenaeum in
which he published a 'Political Sketch of Travancore’ (1856), Rama Varma
wrote in the Indian Statesman open letters with the heading ‘Topics For Mr. F.N.
Maltby’ (The British Resident of Travancore) in 1858-59. These letters, which
appeared under the nom de plume ‘Brutus’, caused quite a sensation in those
days.** The Maharaja's Dewan, Raja Sir T. Madhava Rao (1828-91) was a
brilliant administrator, who wrote regularly after his retirement in 1882 in
Madras newspapers under the pseudonyms. ‘Native Thinker’ and ‘Native
Observer’. His Three Addresses appeared in 1884 and his pamphlet, ‘Hints on
the Training of Native Children, by a Native Thinker’ in 1889.

Among the prominent political figures in the south then was Sir S. Subramania
Iyer (1842-1924), called the ‘grand oldman of South India’. His Speeches and
Writings (1918) have been edited by D.V. Gundappa. M.
Veeraraghavachariar(1857-1906) founded The Hindu in 1878 and S. Kasturi
Ranga Iyengar (1859-1923), who acquired it in 1905, made it one ofthe most
influential English dailies in India. Sir P.S. Sivaswami Iyer (1864-1946) was a
noted liberal leader. A Great Liberal:Speeches and Writings of Sivaswami Iyer,
edited by K. Nilakantha Sastri appeared in 1965.The most renowned of the
Southern Moderate leaders was V.S. Srinivasa Sastri (1869-1946). A disciple of
G K. Gokhale, hewas known as ‘the silver-tongued orator of the Empire’. The
Birth Centenary edition of his Speeches and Writings (2 Vols.) appeared in
1969. A representative selection is The Other Harmony (1945). Sastri’s
biographical studies include Life and Times of Sir Pherozeshah Mehta (1945),
My Master Gokhale(1946) and Thumb-nail Sketches (1946), which consists of
brief pen-portraits of Dadabhai Naoroji, Tilak, Gandhi and other political
figures. Sastri’s speeches reiterate the typical Moderate faith in the British
connection. In a speech in London in 1921 he even called the British empire ‘the
greatest temple of freedom on this planet and hoped that it would be said of
England that she ‘took charge of a people divided from her by colour, by race
and by culture. She fitted them for the tasks of the empire, and when the time
was ripe she gladly admitted them to be full and equal partners in the glory of
the empire and the service of humanity. Sastri’s Lectures on Ramayano
delivered in 1944 (included in Speeches and Writings, Vol. II) have worn better
than his political orations. He treats the Hindu epic not as a religious but an
essentially human document. His remarkable success as an orator was due to his
melodious and well-modulated voice, his fluent and finely articulated delivery,
his purist’s sure choice of words and his perfect control of sentence structure.
Sastri’s art as a biographer has received surprisingly scant attention. In his
biography of Pherozeshah Mehta, Sastri protests against the Indian biographer’s
passion for lionizing and declares, ‘Let our sense of human values be robust. Let
us be to our children in the pages of biography and autobiography no better and
no worse than they see us in everyday life.’ Practising what he preached, Sastri
draws his portraits with warts and all. While admiring Mehta and Surendranath
Banerjea, he observes that Sir Pherozeshah was a ‘great’ man but hardly a
‘good* one; and comments on Surendranath s love of flattery, his gullibility and
the superficiality of his ideas. Like all successful biographers, Sastri also has an
eye for the telling detail and the human idiosyncrasy. He notes the great
Gokhale’s childlike habit of clapping his hands in his lighter moments, his
passion for playfully ‘betting on all occasions and sundry’, and his love of
sweets; and Sir Dinsha Wacha’s squeaking voice.Sarojini Naidu, whose poetry
has already oeen considered, was also one of the most noted orators in an age
abounding in accomplished platform speakers. ' Her speeches have been
collected in Speeches and Writings (1919). What set her distinctly apart was the
bardic quality that gave wings to her words. As Harindranath Chattopadhyaya
puts it, ‘Her extraordinary oratory poured through her like music, silver shot
with gold, cataracting from summits of sheer inspiration.’"7Though much of the
magic of this impassioned utterance is inevitably lost in cold print, enough of it
survives in the process to indicate its quality. Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy
(1877-1947) the distinguished Indo-Sinhalese scholar, the spirit of whose work
vindicates his own rhetorical query, ‘Can wc think of India as complete without
Ceylon?’, must legitimately find a place among Indian English prose writers.
The son of a Sri Lankan Tamil father and an English mother, Coomaraswamy
was trained as a geologist and worked as Director, Minerological Survey of
Ceylon for sometime before embarking on the study of Eastern art. For a number
of years he was keeper of Indian and Muhammedan Art and Research Fellow in
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was a prolific writer and the bibliography
of his publications comprises about a thousand items, including books,
pamphlets, and articles on art, religion, metaphysics, language and culture.
Among his principal works are Me Aie Gal Sinhalese Art (1908), Essays in
National Idealism (1909), Art and Swadeshi (1911), Arts and Crafts of India and
Ceylon (1913), Introduction to Indian Art (1913J, Buddha and the Gospel of
Buddhism (1916), Rajpur Painting (1916), The Dunce of Shiva (1918), History
of Indian and Indonesian Art(1927), A New Approach to the Vedas (1933), The
Transformation of Nature in Art (1934), The Bugbear of Literacy (1943), Why
Exhibit Works of Art? (1943) reprinted as Christian and Oriental Philosophy of
Art (1956) and Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought? (1946). His numerous
articles cover, apart from art, diverse topics such as ‘Some Pali Words’,
‘Symbolism of Archery’, ‘Indian Coins’, ‘Sati’, ‘The Shadow-Play in Ceylon’
etc.Coomaraswamy began as a critic of oriental art, but he soon came to believe
that ‘Art history is the history of the spirit’. This led him to a deep study of
Hindu religion and metaphysics and the entire oriental culture and tradition
which he then related effectively to modern eastern civilization and its problems.
One of the pioneers of a just evaluation of Hindu and eastern art, he demolished
several prejudices and misconceptions regarding the nature, aims and techniques
of oriental art held by earlier critics like Ruskin, Birdwood and Fergusson, and
showed how Hindu and Buddhist art was a meaningful expression of the Indian
ethos. Another signal contribution of his was his discovery of Rajput painting. A
firm believer in the doctrine that the greatest art was rooted in life, he found this
art perfected in ancient Indian civilization at its height. He ascribed the
degradation of modern India to its neglect of its own ancient art, culture and
tradition, and warned his countrymen, ‘Before we can have India, we must
become Indians.’ A scathing critic of modern industrial civilization, he
denounced it as one with ‘exaggerated standards of living and depreciated
standards of life.’ He diagnosed the modern malaise as due to the divorce of art
from life and life from its perennial concerns and pleaded for a world civilization
based not on competition and conflict but on mutual understanding and.
cooperation. His ideal man was to unite the virility of the West with the serenity
of the East thus to become ‘a citizen of the world’ in the ‘profoundest sense’.
Coomaraswamy wrote a compact and muscular prose full of energy and vigour.
His numerous, apt and annotated foot-notes are not intended as an exhibition of
his- vast scholarship but as ramifications and clarifications of his ideas. He is
occasionally apt to take a rather starry-eyed view of the oriental tradition and
pre-Indus- trial life; and some of his theories regarding Rajput painting and
Mughal art have been disproved by later scholars. Nevertheless, his importance
as an ambassador of Indian and oriental art, thought and tradition cannot be
over-estimated; and his stature as a thinker and a sage is perhaps yet to be fully
measured. His trenchant criticism of modern life and civilization and his
passionate concern for the abiding values make him a prophet whose words are
of urgent relevance to the bur man condition today.Biography , Autobiography,
Travel Books, Essays and Criticism Apart from Srinivasa Sastri’s biographical
studies (which, chronologically, come later), this period produced a number of
biographies of various kinds. These include lives of ancientprophets and sages
like Ameer Alt’s Life of Muhammad (1873), Manmath Nath Dutt’s Prophets of
Ind. (2 Vols., 1894), Khetrapal Chakravarti’s Life of Sri Chaitanya (1897) and
Sisir Kumar Ghose’s Lord Gauranga: Life of Krishna Chaitanya of Nadia (2
vols., 1897-8); political biographies like T. Rama Row’s Biographical Sketches
of the Rajahs of Venktagiri (1875) and W.E. Dhanakoti Raju’s Queen Empress
Victoria (1887); collections of brief sketches of the lives of modern Indians like
Ram Gopal Sanyal’s A General Biography of Bengal Celebrities (1889),
Sohrabji Jahangir’s Representative Men of India (1889), Samuel Sathianadhan’s
Sketches of Indian Christians (1896) and C. Paramaswaran Pillai’s
Representative Indians (1897) , full-length biographies of modern Indians like
Lights and Shades of the East: or A Study of the Life of Baboo Haris Chander by
Framji Bomanji (1863); Memoir of the Late Hon'ble Justice Onooucool Chunder
Mookerjee by Mohindranauth Mookerjee (1873), two studies of Kristo Das Pal
by Ram Coomar Dey (1886) and Nagendra Nath Ghose (1887) respectively; two
studies of Behramaji M. Malabari by Dayaram Gidumal (1888) and R.P. Kakaria
(1896), respectively; and R.P. Paranjpye’s Life of G.K. Gokhale (1915) andLife
of D.K. Karve (1915).As regards autobiography, besides works like
SurendranathBanerjea’s A Nation in the Making and N.G. Chandavarkar’sA
Wrestling Soul which have already been mentioned, an early notable attempt is
Abdul Latif Khan’s A Short Account ofmy Public Life (1885).Among travel
books, perhaps the earliest notable effort isBolanath Chandra’s The Travels of a
Hindoo to Various Parts ofBengal and Upper India (2 Vols., 1869). Chattrapati
Rajaramthe Maharaja of Kolhapur’s diary of his- brief sojourn inEurope ending
in his untimely death appeared in 1872 under the title, Diary of the Late Rajah of
Kolhapur. R.C. Dutt’s Three Years in Europe (1872, 1895) and Rambles in India
(1895) have already been considered. More diverting owing to the strong
admixture of comedy in them are the travelogues ofBehramji Merwanji
Malabari, the Bombay poet, social reformer and editor of East and West and
Indian Spectator. He is less remembered to-day for his writings on social and
political reform like Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood in India(1887)
and The Indian Nation (1894) than for two delightful travel books in the manner
of Mark Twain. The twentysix pieces inGujarat and the Gujaratis (1882) are an
engaging medley of description, character-sketches, comic incidents, anecdotes
and social criticism. Malabari’s comedy takes various forms including satire,
irony, parody, wit and humour. He reveals himself to be an extremely shrewed
observer of men and manners, whether in characterizing Broach as ‘a henpecked
town’ (‘hen-pecked by the river’, her husbands ‘henpecked by their wives , and
her officials ‘hen-pecked by their mistress, the Bombay Government’), or
parodying the darbar customs of Baroda State. His sketches of the village barber
and the small town pleader and their ways are uproariously funny. Beneath this
varied comedy there is a persistent undertone of social criticism also, exposing
the British bureaucrat's apathy during a famine, the over-zealous ways of the
white missionaries and the obscurantism of Hindu, Muslim and Parsi priests.
The Indian Eye on English Life or Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer (1891), an
account of Malabari’s visit to England is a much less successful book, though it
has its own comic felicities. The description here is far more, generalized, with
fewer characters and incidents (the sketch of the London Policeman is
outstanding). The social reformer in Malabari comes out when he admires the
self-reliance and the spirit of English women, though he is shocked by their
generally bad teeth and their refusal to nurse their babies. Some other travel
books of the period are P.C. Mazoomdar’s Sketches of a Tour Round the World
(1884); Bhagvat Sinh Jee the Thakore of Gondal’s Journal of a Visit to England
in 1883 (1886); Sambhu Chandra Mukerji’s Travels and Voyages between
Calcutta and Independent Tipperah (1887); G. Parama- swaran Pillai's London
and Paris through Indian Spectacles (1898), and T. Ramakrishna Pillai’s My
Visit to the West(1915).Nagesh Wishwanath Pai’s Stray Sketches in
Chakmakporefrom the Notebook of an Idle Citizen (1894), though not exactly a
travel book, is similar in conception and strategy to Malabari's Gujarat and
Gujaratis. The ‘notebook' comprises thirty six pen-portraits or various Indian
types including the ‘Irritable Sahib', the ‘Mithaiwalla’, ‘Medicos of the Street’,
the ‘Parsi girl,’ the ‘Pooranik’, etc. Pai’s sketches certainly compare
unfavourably with Malabari’s since his humour is rather heavy- handed, his
persistent, trite moralizing being an additional irritant. Another early collection
of essays is A. Madhaviah’s Thillai Govindan's Miscellany (1907), which
discusses in a serious vein subjects like the position of women and caste.There
was hardly any critical writing of note in the earlierperiod. Now, with the spread
of English education, criticismin various areas slowly begins to appear. The
earliest treatisesconcern the arts in India and Sanskrit literature. Prominent
examples are two studies of Indian music: Hindu Music (1873) by Loka Nath
Ghose and Yantra Kosha: A Treasury of MusicalInstruments of Ancient India
(1857) by Sourindra Mohan Tagore,who also wrote Bharatiya Natya Rahasya: A
Treatise on HinduDrama (1878) and Dramatic Sentiments of the Aryans (1883).
R.G. Bhandarkar’s The Critical, Comparative and Historicalmethod of Enquiry
as applied to Sanskrit Scholarship and Philosophy and Indian Archaeology
(1888) is a pioneering methodological attempt. Among the earliest critical
studies of the ancient Sanskrit epics are C.V. Vaidya’s The Mahabharata:
ACriticism (1905), The Riddle of the Ramayana (1906) and EpicIndia or India
as described in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana(1907). K. Narayanaswami
Aiyar’s The Puranas in the light ofModern Science (1916) employs an
interesting approach. B.K. Sarkar's Love in Hindu Literature (1916) is a
noteworthy thematic study.Along with Sanskrit, literature in the several Indian
languages also begins to be studied critically Prominent examples are Ramesh
Chunder Dutt’s The Literature of Bengali 1879; revised and enlarged ed.. 1895;)
D.C. Sen’s History of theBengali Language and Literature (1911); and Folk
Literatureof Bengal (1920); v.s.C. Pillai’s History of the Tamil ProseLiterature
(1904); C. Ramakrishna Rao’s Vemana, the TeluguPoet and Saint (1914); and K.
M. Jhaveri’s Milestones in Gujarati Literature (1914).

Studies of Indian English and Anglo-Indian writers too make their earliest
appearance—these include two books on B.M. Malabari—G.A. Natesan’s
Behramji M. Malabari: A Sketch of his life and an Appreciation of His Work
(1914) and Jogendra Singh’s B.M. Malabari: Rambles with the Pilgrim
Reformer (1914); Jogendra Nath Gupta’s Life and Work of Romesh Chunder
Dutt (1911); G.A. Natesan’s Mrs. Sarojini Naidu: A Sketch of her Life and an
Appreciation of Her Works (1914); and two studies of Rabindranath Tagore—
B.K. Roy’s Rabindranath Tagore: The Man and His Poetry (1915) and K.S.R.
Sastri’s Sir Rabindranath Tagore: His Life, His Personality and Genius (1917);
P. Seshadri’s An Anglo-Indian Poet: John Leyden (1912) and Anglo-Indian
Poetry (1915) and S.M. Mitra’s Anglo-Indian Studies (1913) are among the
earliest appraisals in this area.

British literature also starts engaging the attention of Indian English critics. One
of the earliest specimens is the nineteen page preface in English written by M.M.
Kunte of Poona to his long poem in Marathi, Raja Shivaji (1871). This piece
deals with critical issues such as the nature of poetry, the antinomies between
Science and Literature and the Classical and the Romantic and generally echoes
contemporary Victorian critical opinion on these problems, though the author’s
analysis of the aesthetic taste of the Marathas is an attempt at independent
critical enquiry. Ramchandra Ghose’s A Synopsis of English Literature (1896) is
a workmanlike .survey. Brajendranath Seal’s New Essays in Criticism (1903)
deals with the Romantic movement with special emphasis on Keats. R.V. Subba
Rao’s Othello Unveiled (1906) and Hamlet Unveiled (1909) are probably the
earliest appreciations of Shakespeare; Ramaraya Mohanraya wrotea brief
brochure, Shakespeare the Artist, in 1914. Harendra Coomar Mukhapadhyaya,
who enjoys the distinction of earning the first Indian Ph.D. in English for his
thesis on the origins of the English Novel in 1918 had earlier published his study
The Supernatural in Scott in 1917.
Drama
Indian English drama dates from 1831, when Krishna Mohan Banerji wrote The
Persecuted or Dramatic Scenes Ulustralive of the present state of Hindoo Society
in Calcutta. In his preface, Banerji claims that ‘inconsistencies and the blackness
of the influei tial members of the Hindoo community have been depicted before
their eyes. They will now clearly perceive the wiles and tricks of the Bramins
[sic.] and thereby be able to guard themselves against them.’ This somewhat
crude presentation of the conflict in the mind of a sensitive Bengali youth
between orthodoxy and the new ideas ushered in by Western education remained
a solitary dramatic effort, not only in Bengal but also anywhere in India for more
than a generation. Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the poet, translated three of his
own Bengali plays into English: Ratnavali (1858)—a version of Harsha’s well-
known Sanskrit play, Sermista (1839) and -Is This Called Civilization?(1871).
Another play of his, Nation Builders, was published posthumously in 1922.
Ramkinoo Dutt’s Mani pur a Tragedy (1893) completes the all too brief tale of
Indian English drama published in Bengal in the nineteenth century. In fact, even
in Bengal—the fountain-head of most forms of Indian English literature—drama
in English failed to secure a local theatrical habitation, in sharp contrast to plays
in the mother tongue (both original and in the form of adaptations from foreign
languages); and the appetite for plays in English could more conveniently be fed
on performances of established dramatic successes in English by foreign authors.
For instance, the first Bengali play to be staged (27 November, 1795) was an
adaptation of a musical farce—The Disguise by Jodrell; and the Hindoo Theatre
established by Prosannakumar Tagore on 21 December 1831 staged portions of
Julius Caesar** Owing to the lack of a firm dramatic tradition nourished on
actual performance in a live theatre, early Indian English drama in Bengal, as
elsewhere in India, grew sporadically as mostly closet drama; and even later,
only Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya
produced a substantial corpus of dramatic writing.

Between 1891 and 1916, Sri Aurobindo wrote five complete and six incomplete
verse plays. Of these, the earliest are two fragments written during his student
days in London: The Witch of Uni: A Dream of the Woodlands (1891) and
Achab and Esar(n.d.). To the Baroda period (1893-1906) belong The Viziers of
Bassora—A Dramatic Romance, Perseus the Deliverer, Rodogune and three
fragments: The Maid in the Mill: Love Shuffles the Cards, The House of Brut
and The Birth of Sin (which appeared as a poetic dialogue in Collected Poems
and Plays, 1942). Prince ofEdur (a revised version of The Prince of Mathura)
was written in 1907, While Eric: A Dramatic Romance and Vasavadutta are
assigned to the period between 1912 and 1916. All the five complete plays, with
the exception of Perseus the Deliverer, were published years later, between 1957
and 1960, Perseus the Deliverer having been first serialized in Bande Mataram,
Calcutta, in 1907 and also included in the Collected Poems and Plays (1942). All
the eleven plays have now appeared in the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary
Library Edition, Volumes 6 and 7—Collected Plays and Short Stories: Parts I
and 11 (1971).

The two early fragments— The Witch of Ilni and Achab and Esar—already
indicate Sri Aurobindo’s abiding fascination for Elizabethan drama. The Viziers
of Bassora, based on a story from The Arabian Nights shows how a pair of
young lovers are reunited after a series of trials, through the benevolence of
Haroun AlRasheed, Caliph of Bagdad. The contrast between the ‘good’ Vizier
and the ‘bad’ is the mainspring of the action. Entirely Elizabethan in conception
and structure, the play is clearly modelled after Shakespearian comedy. The
disguised Caliph controlling the destinies of his st Sjects recalls the Duke in
Measure for Measure; Fareed, the bad Vizier’s deformed son is a compound of
Caliban and Richard III; and Balkis and Ajebe are Arabian versions of Beatrice
and Benedick. Perseus the Deliverer which, in the author’s own words, is ‘a
romantic story of human temperament and life-impulses on the Elizabethan
model’ is a more substantial play, which tries to use the ancient Greek legend of
Perseus and Andromeda to represent the evolution of the human mind from a
primitive conception of a vengeful deity towards the idea of a godhead full of
grace and compassion. But the message of the play is all but drowned in
persistent and loud Shakespearian echoes in character, incident and even
dialogue. This is also true of Rodogune,Sri Aurobindo’s only tragedy. Set in
ancient Syria, the play is a representation of a fratricidal conflict arising out of a
love-triangle, and is perhaps.the roost derivative of all Sri Aurobindo’s dramatic
creations. Of the fragments. The Maid in the Mill is a comedy with Spain as the
background and The House of Brut a tragedy of unbounded egoism, set in
ancient Britain; while The Birth of Sin centres round Lucifer. Prince of Edur,
which also remained incomplete, draws on Rajput history, and deals with the
romantic motif of a usurper’s daughter falling in love with the rightful heir in
disguise. It is again love that resolves the political conflict inEric, the setting for
which is Norway. Aslaug, the sister of Swegn, a rebel earl, comes to slay Eric,
the King of Norway, but stays to fall in love with the intended victim.
Vasavadutta is a variation on the same theme. Based on a story in the
Kathasaritsagara, it shows how Vvtsa Udayan, the king of Cowsambie, captured
through treachery by Chunda Mahasegn, the king of Avunthie, neatly turns the
tables on his captor by capturing the heart of Vasavadutta, Chunda Mahasegn’s
daughter.

An interesting feature of Sri Aurobindo’s plays is their variety of period and

locale, ranging from ancient Greek times to medieval India and covering diverse
lands including Iraq, Syria, India, Spain, Britain and Norway. The two
characteristic Aurobindoean themes in the plays are the idea of human evolution
in Perseus the Deliverer and love as a benevolent force destroying evil and
conflict and making for harmony and peace in The Viziers of Bassora, Prince of
Edur, Eric and Vasavadutta.However, only committed disciples will maintain
that these themes have been realized in the plays with the same amount of
creative power as has gone into the making of Savitri and The Life Divine.
Modelling his plays exclusively on late Victorian pastiches of Shakespearian
drama, Sri Aurobindo unfortunately imposed crippling limitations on his
drarpatic talent, while inSavitri he boldly experimented with age-old epic
conventions. In the large whispering gallery resounding with Shakespearian
echoes which his plays in the main appear to be, Sri Aurobindo’s distinctive
voice is scarcely heard as effectively as in the other forms. It is sad that even in
handling purely Indian material in Prince of Edur and Vasavadutta,' the dramatist
could not throw off the yoke of Shakespeare, with the result that his characters
seem to think, soeak and act less like authentic Indians than like Elizabethan
personages in Indian garb. In spite of some scenes of dramatic tension, stray
passages of poetic beauty and a few moments of bright wit and humour in the
comedies, the drama of Sri Aurobindo is perhaps hardly in the same class as his
major poetry and prose.

In examining, the plays of Rabindranath Tagore, a distinction has once again to

be made, as in the case of his verse, between translations done by the author
himself and those produced by others. This unfortunately excludes the better-
known plays such as The Post Office (translated by Devabrata Mukher- jee) and
The King of the Dark Chamber (translated by K.C. Sen). Nevertheless, there
remain almost a dozen plays done into English by Tagore himself. These include
Chitra (1913), The Cycle of Spring (1917; translated with assistance from C.F.
Andrews and Nishikanta Sen), and Sacrifice and Other Plays (1917). All these
appear in the Collected Poems and Plays (1936). Red Oleanders, translated by
Tagore himself from his Raktakarabi in Bengali was first published in the
VisvaBharati Quarterly in 1924. Tagore’s own translation of his Natir Puja
appeared in the same journal in 1927, thus predating the one by Marjorie Sykes
in 1950.

Since, while translating from his original Bengali, Tagore made extensive
changes in the text (as in the case of his verse also), these plays are virtually
redone in prose, rather than being simple translations. Thematically, the plays
fall into two broad groups: thesis plays and psychological dramas. In the first
group may be included Sanyasi, The Cycle of Spring, Chitra, Malini.Sacrifice,
Natir Puja and Red Oleanders. To the second belong The King and the Queen,
Kacha and Devayani, Kama and Kuntiand The Mother's Prayer.

In Sanyasi and The Cycle of Spring, the central thesis is the celebration of life.
The ascetic in Sanyasi runs away from the orphaned girl who clings to him, in
the fear that she will ensnare him into attachment to this world. In .the end, he
realizes when it is too late, that his affection for her cannot be rooted out; when
he returns, she is dead. In The Cycle of Spring, the middle* aged king, afraid of
the approach of old age, is convinced by the poet, who stages a symbolic play
before him, that change being the law of life, the secret of happiness is joyous
acceptance. Chitra is a dramatic sermon on the theme of true love. Arjuna, the
Pandavn prince, spurns the homely Chitra, daughter of the king of Manipur.
Later, when transformed into a beautiful damsel by a boon from the god of love,
she approaches him again, he is infatuated with her. In the end, she resumes her
original form, and Arjuna learns the lesson that true love transcends mere
physical beauty. In Malini, Sacrifice and Notir Puja (‘The Court Dancer’s
Worship’) religious fanaticism is exposed. Princess Malini, a devotee of
Buddhism in a Hindu kingdom, is denounced by orthodoxy, but her transparent
sincerity saves her, and Kemankar, her principal accuser himself meets a just
retribution. The same motif appears in Sacrifice, where the orthodox priest,
Raghupati, resists the liberal King’s plans to abolish the practice of sacrifice,
until the priest’s own son, Jai- sing immolates himself on the altar. Srimati, the
Buddhist dancer in a Hindu court in Natir Puja is compelled, on pain of death, to
commit sacrilege by dancing before a Buddhist shrine. She makes her dance an
act of worship, thus inviting death. (At the same time, the limitations of
Buddhism too are pointed out by Queen Lokesvari in the play.) Red Oleanders is
a symbolic presentation of the triumph of humanistic values over soul-killing
Mammonism. Nandini, the spirit of joy, love and beauty destroys the tyrannical
regime in Yaksha Town, which has reduced ifs citizens to gold-digging slaves,
though she herself dies in the process.
An interesting feature of the psychological plays is Tagore’s insight into the
feminine mind. In The King and the Queen, the spirited Sumitra boldly
admonishes the King, who, lost in his pleasures, neglects his subjects. She tries
to enlist the help of her brother, a neighbouring monarch, in breaking the power
of the King’s officials, who are all foreigners; but both she and her brother
perish in the ensuing political holocaust. While the political allegory is obvious,
it is the brave Queen who dominates the play. In Kacha and Devayani, Devayani
finds all her hopes frustrated when she realizes that her playmate Kacha has only
gratitude to offer her but no love and lays a curse on him which practically
defeats his very purpose in having come to her father for his training,

Two contrasted manifestations of maternal love are presented in Kama and

Kunti and The Mother's Prayer. On the eve of the Mahabharata War, Kunti, the
mother of the Pandavas, reveals to Kama the secret that he is her son, hoping
that this would induce him to join the Pandavas; but the high-souled Kama
refuses to be tempted. In The Mother's Prayen, Gandhari steels her heart and
requests her husband to renounce their wicked son, Duryodhana who has
engineered the exile of the Pandavas through sheer trickery; and when her prayer
is rejected, she prophetically forecasts the terrible day which will bring
retribution to all her sons.

Tagore’s English plays have a compact and neat structure, though their originals
in Bengali often followed the loose Elizabethan model. This is so because in his
translations, Tagore subjected his texts to rigorous condensation, as a result of
which the English versions possess an economy which the originals mostly lack,
though experts have noted that much complexity and richness have been lost in
the process. Tagore’s principal characters tend to be symbolic and allegorical in
the thesis plays and archetypal in the psychological dramas, and often attain a
certain universality. His setting is invariably non-realis- tic, being either puranic
or legendary or feudal or patently symbolic, and the dialogue, time and again
attains a true poetic flavour as inKarna and Kunti. Tagore’s drama, firmly rooted
in the Indian ethos in its themes and characters and eminently expressive of his
deepest convictions in creative terms, is comparable at its best, with the modern
imaginative drama of W.B. Yeats and Maurice Maeterlinck.

Harindranath Chattopadhyaya began his career as a dramatist with Abu Hassan

(1918), a light fantasy in prose and verse His Poems and Plays (1927) contain
seven verse plays on the lives of Indian saints: Pundalik, Saku Bai, Jayadeva,
Chokha Mela, Ekanath, Raidas and Tukaram. The poetic quality of these plays is
superior to their dramatic virtues. Five Plays (1929) are in prose and are strongly
coloured by the author’s socialist sympathies. The Window and The Parrot are
glimpses into the lives of the poor and The Coffin and The Evening Lamp,
ironical sketches of two young romantics. The Sentry’s Lantern is a symbolic
expression of the hope of the dawn of a new era for the poor. There is an
uncomfortable alliance between symbolism and realism in these plays. For their
general air of artificiality, their wooden and crudely allegorical characters with
their conventional stances and long, propagandistic speeches are equally
responsible. The Sleeper Awakened (n.d.) is an allegorical satire on the evils of
modern civilization and The Saint: A Farce (1946) an expos6 of pinchbeck
holiness, in which an opium-addict is mistaken for a holy sage. Kannoppan or
the Hunter of Kalahari, a ‘lyric play’ on the theme of the right of a lowly hunter
to enter a temple, appeared in 1950. Siddhartha: Man of Peace (1956), an
ambitious effort in eight acts, is a dramatization, in verse and prose, of the life of
the Buddha. Loose in construction and generally poor in dramatic values, it is a
rather undistinguished work on a distinguished subjects Chattopadhyaya’s plays
fail owing to both his inability to create living characters speaking in an
individual voice and to work out his themes in viable dramatic terms. Their best
claim to remembrance is a few passages of rich romantic verse.

Apart from the plays of Sri Aurobindo, Tagore and Chatto- padhyaya, there are
only stray efforts during the period like Sarath Kumar Ghose’s The Prince of
Destiny (1910); Kedarnath Das Gupta’s Calif for a Day (1916) and Bharata
(with Margaret G. Mitchell) (1918) and Dhan Gopal Mukherji’s Layla-Majnu
(1916).

As compared to Bengal, the story of early Indian English drama in Bombay is

much briefer. Though the first theatre in Bombay, The Bombay Amateur
Theatre, was built in 1776, dramatic activity was almost exclusively limited to
performances by visiting European touring companies. With the rise of modern
drama in Marathi and Gujarati heralded by Annasaheb Kirloskar’s epoch-
making production of Shdktmtal in Marathi in 1880, the vernacular stage soon
posed a formidable challenge to English drama. The only available examples of
Indian English drama in Bombay during the nineteenth century are C.S. Nazir’s
verse playThe First Parsi Baronet (1866), and D.M. Wadia’s The Indian Heroine
(1877), based on the events of 1857. And P.P. Meherjee’sDolly Parsen (1918) is
the only other effort of note before 1920.

Madras began later than Bombay but soon surpassed it in playwriting. The
Madras Dramatic Society, which encouraged amateur European theatricals, was
founded in 1875. The Oriental Drama Club followed in 1882 and the first Indian
amateur dramatic society in South India, The Sarasa Vinodini Sabha, was
founded by Krishnamacbary of Beliary in 1890. The most productive of the
Madras dramatists of the period was V.V. Srinivasa Aiyangar (1871-1954),
author of Blessed in a Wife (1911),The Point of View (1915), Wait for the
Stroke (1915), The Bricks Between (1918), etc. Two collections of his plays
entitledDramatic Divertissements (2 Vols.) appeared in 1921. His Rama Rajya
(1952) is a later play on the theme of ideal Kingship and Government. Though
he lias tried his hand at the thesis play in The Bricks Between and historical
drama in At Any Cost,Aiyangar is at his entertaining best in light comedies with
a farcical touch, dealing with South Indian urban middle class life, likeVitchu's
Wife and The Surgeon-General’s Prescription. None of the other Madras
playwrights was equally active. Among these were P.V.R. Raju [Urjoon Sing or
the Princess Regained (ISIS) and Lord Likely (1876)]; Krishnam- macharya
[Dasaratha or The Fatal Promise (1901)]; J. Vira- bhadra Rao [Mani and Ratna
(1911)]; A. Srinivasacharya [Harischandra or The Martyr to Truth(1912)];
Krishna Iyer [Lord Clive(1913)]; S. Ranga Iyer [77ie Hanging Doctor(1913)];
A.C. Krishnaswamy [The Two Twice-borns(1914)] R.S. Narayanaswami Aiyar
(Scenes from Social Life: Varasulka 1915)]; J.S.R. Sarma [Srintad Ramayana /:
Balakanda(1916)]; T.B. Krishnaswamy [Nur Jehan (1918); Satya or The Altar of
Love (1919)]; and K.S. Ramaswami Sastri (Harischandra(1918);
Droupadi(1939)].

This brief chronicle of the growth of early Indian English drama mqy be
concluded with a mention of what is perhaps the only known Indian English play
to come from North India during the period: Death or Dishonourby an
anonymous author published in Dehra Dun in 1914.
Fiction
Though its growth in later years far exceeded that of most other forms, fiction
was actually the last to arrive on the Indian English literary scene. The earliest
fictional efforts—tales rathe, than novels proper—appeared in journals. Kylash
Chunder Dutt’s A Journal of 48 hours of the Year 1945 was published in The
Calcutta Literary Gazette on 6 June 1835. In this literary fantasy, the author
narrates the story of an imaginary unsuccessful revolt against the British rule a
hundred years later. Cast in the same mould, Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s Republic
of Orissa: Annals from the pages of the Twentieth Century appeared in
theSaturday Evening Hurkaru on 25 May 1845. Set in the second decade of the
twentieth century, this fantasy depicts a British defeat leading to the
establishment of a democratic republic in Orissa. Bankim Chandra Chatteijee’s
(1838-94) first and only novel in English, Rajmohan's Wife was serialized in the
Calcutta Weekly, The Indian Field in 1864, though it appeared in book- form
only in 1935. (In this version, the first three chapters are translated from the
author’s later Bengali version by B.N. Banerji, since the English original could
not be traced; the rest constitutes the author’s serialized English text). This is a
rather melodramatic tale of the trials of a typical, long-suffering Hindu wife,
Matangini, at the hands of her husband, Rajmohan, who is a bully, the setting
being an East Bengal village in the late nineteenth century. Sketchy and lacking
in adequate character- motivation, the novel compares most unfavourably with
this author’s later masterpieces in Bengali. An interesting feature of style is the
liberal use of Indian words, creating local colour. A fifteen page fragment
comprising the English translation, in Bankim Chandra’s own handwriting, of
his Bengali novel, Devi Chaudhurani(1869) has also survived.

From the sixties up to the end of the nineteenth century, stray novels continued
to appear mostly by writers from the Bengal and Madras presidencies, with
Bombay, strangely enough, lagging far behind. (Some of these novels were,
however, published not in India, but in London). And there are no novelists with
a sizable output to their credit. A majority of these novels are social and a few
historical, and their models are obviously the eighteenth and the nineteenth
century British fiction, particularly Defoe, Fielding and Scoit. An interesting
development is the surprisingly early appearance of women novelists, though'
female education took a long time to spread. Novels by as many as three women
novelists appeared before the turn of the century. Toru Dutt’s unfinished novel,
Bianca or The Young Spanish Maiden, a romantic love story set in England
(Calcutta, 1878); Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kanuila, A Story of Hindu life
(Madras and Bombay, 1895), and Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life
(Madras and Bombay, 1895)—both thinly veiled exercises in autobiography; and
Shevantibai M. Nikambe’s Ratanbai. A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste Hindu
Young Wife(London, 1895).

Among the novels to be published between 1864 and 1900 were Ram Krishna
Punt’s The Boy of Bengal (London, Philadelphia, 1866); Tarachand
Mookerjea’s The Scorpions or Eastern Thoughts (Allahabad, 1868); Lal Behari
Day’s Govinda Samanta, or The History of a Bengal Balyat (London, 1874)—
revised and enlarged version published under the title, Bengal Peasant Life
(London, 1908); Gowry, an Indian Village Girlby an anonymous author
(Madras, 1876); Ananda Prosad Dutt’s The indolence (Calcutta, 1878); Shoshee
Chunder Dutt’s The Young Zamindar (London, 1883); Trailokya Nath Das’s
Hirimba’s Wedding (Midnapore, 1884); Mirza Moorad Alee Beg’s Lalun, the
Beragun, or, The Battle of Panipat (Bombay, 1884); Sanjihi Mull’s The
Interesting Story of Prince Poorun (Delhi, 1886); M. Dutt’sBijoy Chand: An
Indian Tale (Calcutta, 1888). aad Lt. Suresh Biswas: His Life and Adventures
(Calcutta, 1900); Kamarupa and Kamalatha (Calcutta, 1889) by an anonymous
author; Yogendranath Chattopadhyaya’s The Girl and Her Tutor (Bhagalpur,
1891); and B.R. Rajam Iyer’s fragment of a religious novel. True Greatness or
Vasudeva Sastri (serialized in Prabuddha Bharata,1896-98; published in book
form, London, 1925).

With the turn of the century, novelists with a somewhat more substantial output
began to appear. Romesh Chunder Dutt, whose verse and prose have already
been considered, translated two of his own Bengali novels into English: The
Lake of Palms: A Story of Indian Domestic Life (London, 1902) is a realistic
novel of social reform with widow re-marriage as one of its themes; while The
Slave Girl of Agra, an Indian Historical Romance (London, 1909) is set in the
Mughal period. A fellow- Bengali, Sarath Kumar Ghosh, wrote a fantasy.
Verdict of the Gods (N.Y., 1905; later published under the title, 1001 Indian
Nights: The Trials of Narayan Lal, London, 1906), and ThePrince, of Destiny:
The New Krishna (London, 1909), a novel about an enlightened Rajput prince of
the later nineteenth century, which is of interest as one of the earliest fictional
attempts to deal with Eastwest relationship, an oft-repeated theme in the Indian
English novel.

Two prominent Madras contemporaries of these novelists from Bengal were A.

Madhaviah and T. Ramakrishna Pillai. After an early effort—Satyananda (1909)
—a slight work, Madhaviah ' wrote Thillai Govindan [London, 1916; first
published pseudony- mously as A Posthumous Autobiography edited by Pamba
(1908)]. This is an absorbing account, probably autobiographical, of the mental
development of a contemporary south Indian Brahmin youth. Under the impact
of western education he loses his faith but in the end his rediscovery of The Gita
brings him peace. The novel contains some authentic vignettes of south Indian
village and urban life. The same author’s Clarinda (Madras, 1915) is a historical
romance dealing with the career of a woman Christian convert of Tanjore.
Among Madhaviah’s later novels were Nanda, the Pariah who overcame Caste
(Madras, 1923) and Lt. Panju—A Modern Indian (Madras, 1924). T.
Ramakrishna Pillai wrote two historical romances a la Scott. Padmini (London,
1903) is a love story in which the heroine, a village maiden, prefers a poor but
high-souled lover to an aristocratic usurper. In A Dive For Death (London,
1911), the chivalrous hero, a poor, obscure youth loved by a princess, dives from
a cliff to save an enemy he has vanquished, survives to be united to the princess
and is finally discovered to be a long-lost prince.

Of the four novels of Sirdar Jogendra-Singh, who hailed from the Punjab, the
first three were published in London and the last in Lahore. Nur Jahan, The
Romance of an Indian Queen (1909) is a historical novel of the Mughal age;
Nasrin, An Indian Medley (1911) is a realistic study of decadent aristocratic life
in North India; and Kamla (1925) and Kamni(sic) (1931) are social fiction.

Apart from these prominent novelists, there are again stray novels by many
writers mostly from the Bengal and Madras presidencies, with Bombay and the
north bringing up the rear; S. T. Ram’s Cosmopolitan Hinduani (Lahore, 1902);
M. Venka- tesiya Naidu’s The Princess Kamala or The Model Wife (Madras,
1904); L.B. Pal’s A Glimpse of Zanana Life in Bengal (Calcutta, 1904); S.M.
Mitra’s Hinaupore; A Peep Behind the Indian Unrest—An Anglo-Indian
Romance (London, 1909); S.B. Banerjea’sThe Adventures of Mrs. Russell
(London, 1909); Balkrishna’s The Love of Kusuma: an Eastern Love Story
(London, 1910); B.K. Sarkar’s Man of Letters (Calcutta, 1911); M.M. Munshi’s
Beauty and Joy (Surat, 1914); Svarna Kumari Ghosal’s (nee Tagore) historical
romance, The Fatal Garland (N.Y., 1915); T. R. Krishnaswamy’s Selma: A Tale
of the Times of Old (Madras, 1916); T.K.. Gopal Panikkar's Storm and Sunshine
(Calicut, 1916); Srinivasa Rau’s Varanasi: The Portuguese Ambassador
(Bezwada, 1917); and C. Parthasarathy's Sangili Karuppan: or The Wheel of
Destiny: (Vellore, 1920), a south Indian romance.
The story of the early Indian English short story is even shorter. The first short
story collections appeared as late as 1885:Realities of Indian Life: Stories
Collected from the Criminal Reports of India (London, 1885) by Shoshee
Chunder Dutt and The Times of Yore: Tales from Indian History (London,
1885) by Shoshee Chunder Dutt and Sourindra Mohan Tagore. Shoshee Chunder
Dutt’s Bengaliana: A Dish of Rice and Curry and other Indigestible Ingredients
(1892) contains two long tales— ‘The Reminiscences of a Kerani’s Life’ and
‘Shunkur: A Tale of the Indian Mutiny of 1857’ and a number of short stories.
Apart from P.V. Ramaswami Raju. the author of The Tales of Sixty Mandarians
(London, 1886) and Indian Fables (London, 1887), there are only two more short
story writers with a collection each to their credit, until the turn of the century:
Khetrapal Chakravarti [Sarala and Hingana—Tales Descriptive of Indian Life
(Calcutta, 1895)] and Samuel and Kamala Satthia- nadhan [Stories of Indian
Christian Life (Madras, 1898)]. B.R. Rajam Aiyar’s 'Miscellaneous Stories’,
which appeared in The Prabuddha Bharat a during 1896-98, are included in his
Rambles in the Vedanta (1905). They are mostly mythological tales retold.

At the beginning of the twentieth century we have the first Indian English short
story writer with a considerable literary output Cornelia Sorabji, a Parsi lady
educated in Britain, became the first woman advocate in Calcutta in 1924. All
her four collections were published in London: Love and Life Behind the Purdah
(1901); Sunbabies: Studies in the Child Life of India (1904);Between the
Twilights: Being Studies of Indian Women by one of Themselves (1908); and
Indian Tales of the Great Ones among Men, Women and Bird-People (1916).
These studies of mostly Hindu and occasionally Parsi life in both princely and
plebeian circles are a mixed collection of stories, anecdotes and character-
sketches. They are generally sympathetic in tone, with an undercurrent of social
reform and are narrated in a leisurely, Victorian manner. Sorabji’s reminiscences
of her life appear in India Calling (1934) and India Recalled (1936). Among
other short story collections of the period are S.S. Bose’s Humorous
Sketches(Allahabad, 1903); S.M. Natesa Sastri’s Indian Folk Tales (Madras,
1908), S.B. Banerjea’s Tales of Bengal (London, 1910) andIndian Detective
Stories (London, 1911); Prabhat Chandra Mukherji's Stories of Bengali Life
(translated by the author and Miriam S. Knight, Calcutta, 1912) Shovona Devi’s
The Oriental Pearls: Indian Folk-lore (London, 1915); Dwijendra Nath Neogi’s
Sacred Tales of India (London, 1916); A. Mad ha-' viah’s Short Stories by
‘Kusika’ (Madras, 1916); and Sunity Devee’s Bengal Dacoits and Tigers
(Calcutta, 1916), The Beautiful Moghul Princesses (Calcutta and London, 1918),
and The Rajput Princesses(London, n.d.).**
This survey of the period between the Great Revolt of 1857 and the first country
wide Non-cooperation movement of 1920 has show,: how these sixty-odd years
produced a number of mature works in Verse and prose, though drama was yet
to establish a tradition and fiction still remained in swaddling clothes. The Indian
resurgence, which had already borne considerable fruit by now, was to receive
an unprecedented momentum in the 1920s, when the star of Tilak set and the sun
of Gandhi rose on the Indian horizon.
CHAPTER 4 The Gandhian Whirlwind:
1920-1947
The winds of change blowing steadily across the Indian subcontinent during
more than a half century after the Great Revolt of 18S7 had left tell-tale marks
on the political and social geography of the country. The end bf the First World
War—a watershed in European history—proved to be an equally significant
period in Indian life, when the Gandhian whirlwind began to sweep over the
length and the breadth of the land, upsetting all established political strategies
and ushering in refreshingly new ideas and methods which shook Indian life in
several spheres to the core. As Nehru puts it, ‘Gandhi... was like a powerful
current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths.’1

The tempo of political agitation was admirably kept up after the War by Tilak,
who emerged from temporary retirement after his release from prison in 1914,
rejoined the Congress, and founded the Home Rule League in 1916; and also by
Mrs. Anne Besant, whose own All India Hdme Rule League was established in
1917. Meanwhile, Gandhi, fresh from his Satyagraha triumph in South Africa
had returned to India in 1915. After undergoing a year’s probation prescribed by
his guru, Gokhale, Gandhi tested successfully his new weapon of nonviolence in
the Champaran campaign against the exploitation of the tenants of the Indigo-
planters in 1917, the Kaira Satyagraha against unjust land assessment demands
during the famine of 1918 and the Ahmedabad Labour dispute in the same year.
In 1919, agitation against the Rowlatt bills led to the Jallianwala Bagh slaughter
which remains as black a blot on the British escutcheon as the notorious
Bibighar massacre of 1857 is on the Indian. As a result of it, ‘a scar was drawn
across IndoBritish relations deeper than any which had been inflicted since the
Mutiny.’2 By this time Gandhi’s leadership had already assumed an all-India
character; and it was almost symbolic of the fact that an age had ended and
another begun, when on the day Tilak died in Bombay (i.e , 1 August, 1920),
Gandhi launched the first country-wide Non-Co-operation Movement. Though it
petered out soon, the movement created an unprecedented awakening, the most
important feature of which was that it had converted Indian nationalism ‘from a
middle class movement to a mass emotion.’2 The movement proved to be ‘a
baptism of fite which initiated the people into a new faith and new hope, and
inspired them with a new confidence in their power to fight for freedom.'* .
Ten years later, Gandhi launched the Civil Disobedience movement in 1930,
which differed substantially from the earlier Non-co-operation movement,
though the goal remained the same. ‘The |first was passively, the second was
actively, revolutionary. The first hoped to bring government to a standstill by
withdrawing from the administration; the second sought to paralyse the
government by mass performance of specific illegal acts.’2 Among these acts,
the one that captured the imagination of the people most was the illegal making
of salt. Gandhi’s twenty-four day march, with seventy-nine chosen followers,
from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi to break the Salt Law in March 1930
electrified the entire civilized world. Ridiculed at first as an irresponsible act of
an eccentric who had somehow persuaded himself to believe that ‘the King
Emperor could be unseated by boiling sea-water in a kettle,’ the Salt Satyagraha
roused India to action as never before. Another ten years later came the third and
last Satyagraha campaign of 1940 which, after the historic ‘Quit India’
resolution of 9 August 1942, led to violent underground revolutionary activity,
while Gandhi and his lieutenants languished in jail. Soon after the end of World
War II, the politicaland economic imperatives of the day compelled Britain to
concede independence to India on 15 August, 1947.

The entire period of near three decades of the Gandhian age was one of far-
reaching changes not only in the political scene but. in practically all areas of
Indian life also. In the political sphere, while the great ipass-awakening
generated an all-pervading national consciousness which facilitated the
assumption of a distinctive national identity after independence, a disruptive
force was the continuing growth of Muslim separatism culminating in the
creation of Pakistan in 1947. Apart from an all too brief period of Hindu-Muslim
unity at the time of the Khilafat agitation in 1919, the march of,events during
these three decades led inexorably to partition and its holocaust. Muslim
separatism, which had grown stridently vocal after Jinnah’s assumption of the
presidentship of the Muslim League in 1934, became increasingly strengthened
during the ’forties and after the spectacular success of the League in the 1946
elections, partition had become virtually inevitable.

In the social sphere, the Gandhian movement led, among other things, to an
unprecedented awakening among women, who responded whole-heartedly to
Gandhi’s call. ‘This was unique in the entire history of India, the spectacle of
hundreds of women taking part in political mass movement, picketing of liquor
shops, marching in demonstrations, courting jails, facing lathi charges aqd
bullets.’* As Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, herself a worthy representative of the
Woman of the Gandhian age, puts it, ‘Women with pale eyes and blushing
cheeks, they who had been gently nurtured behind silken curtains, women who
had never looked upon a crowded street,, never beheld a strange face ... flung
themselves into the blinding glare of day, unshaded and unprotected.... They
faced perils and privations with a happy light in their eyes and a spring in their
limbs. Almost overnight their narrow domestic walls had given away to open a
new wide world in which they had a high place.’7 The groundwork for this
transformation bad been laid, at least in part, by the pioneering work done in the
field of female education and emancipation by organizations such as the Bharat
Stri Mandal—the first women’s organization on an all- India basis—founded in
1910 by Saraladevi Chaudhurani; D.K. Karve’s Women’s University established
in 1916; the Women’s India Association of Madras (1917) and many other
similar efforts.

The rise of a strong Youth movement was another not -ble result of the
Gandhian upsurge, and was a clear indication of how the entire social structure
was being stirred by the new forces at work. Another indication of this is
provided by the awakening among the depressed classes. Religious reform
movements like the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj had already made a plea
for equal rights to the untouchables; and in 1906 the Depressed Classes Mission
Society was founded in Bombay. The Congress under Gandhi made the uplift of
the untouchables an important part of its programme. The All India Harijan
Sevak Sangh was founded by Gandhi in 1932 and significant acts of legislation
towards the amelioration of the lot of the untouchables were undertaken by the
Congress government which came to power in the provinces in 1937. In B.R.
Ambed- kar the scheduled castes found a doughty champion from among their
own ranks. He established the All India Depressed Classes Federation and the
All India Scheduled Castes Federation, besides launching agitations like the
Mahad Satyagraha for the right of use of water-tanks.

In the economic sphere, the period of the First World War saw a rapid
development of Indian industries, and, soon after the Russian revolution, Marxist
ideas reached India. The All India Trade Union Congress was founded in 1920.
After the economic depression of 1929-33, the Second World War gave a further
impetus to the growth of Indian industries. As a social historian puts it, ‘In spite
of its insufficient and unbalanced character, industrialization played almost a
revolutionary role in the life of the Indian people. It led to the consolidation of
the unified national economy which evolved in India as a result of the
introduction of capitalist economic forms in agriculture by the British
government, penetration of India by the commercial forces of the world and
spread of modern transport during the British rule. . . . Further, it brought into
existence modern cities which became the centres of modern culture and
increasing democratic social life and from which all progressive movements,
social, political and cultural, emanated.’8

Indian English literature of the Gandhian age was inevitably influenced by these
epoch-making developments in Indian life. A highly significant feature is the
sudden flowering of the novel during the ’thirties, when the Gandhian movement
was perhaps at its strongest. It is possible to see the connection here if one
remembers that by this decade, the nationalist upsurge had stirred the entire
Indian society to the roots to a degree and on a scale unprecedented earlier,
making it acutely conscious of the pressures of the present in allfields of national
life; and it is

out of this consciousness that fiction, in Lionel Trilling’s words, ‘for our time
the most effective agent of the moral imagination’, emerges. Fiction, as Hazlitt
puts it, is constituted of ‘the very web and texture of society as it really exists’
and hence finds a fertile soil in a society in ferment. The work of K.S.
Venkataramani, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao would not perhaps have been
possible had the miracle that was Gandhi not occurred during this period. In fact,
it was during this age that Indian English fiction discovered some of its most
compelling themes: the ordeal of the freedom struggle, East-West relationship,
the communal problem and the plight of the untouchables, the landless poor, the
down-trodden, the economically exploited and the oppressed. Other forms of
writing, with the exception of prose, however, do not seem to keep pace with the
great strides the novel took during this period; and that this should be so is an apt
illustration of the fundamental irony of literary history which demonstrates time
and again how the processes of literary creation can be understood upto a certain
point beyond which the logic of critical analysis begins to flounder. Thus, while
the novel flourishes (to be followed by the short story soon), Indian English
poetry unaccountably fails to register any signal gains, though bliss it was for a
poet in the Gandhian age to be alive, as the example of poetry in many Indian
languages of the period (like the fiery lyrics of Kusu- magaraja in Marathi, for
instance) conclusively demonstrates; and drama with a few exceptions continues
to be the Cinderella

it was earlier. Only prose—especially political prose—shows that continuing

vitality which had already produced a number or notable works during the earlier
periods as well.
Prose
As in the previous decades, political prose inevitably continues to predominate
during the Gandhian age also. The pride of place here naturally goes to Mahatma
Gandhi (1869-1943). Born in a higher middle class Vaisya family of traders
turned administrators, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had an upbringing in
which the example of his upright father, the influence of his devout mother and
the impact on his sensitive and earnest mind of ancient Hindu legends, such as
those of Harischandra, the votary of truth, Sravana, the model of filial devotion
and Rama were important shaping factors His adolescence, the story of which he
has told with ruthless honesty in his autobiography, was marked by a sharp
conflict between his quest for self-improvement and an equally strong
temptation to transgress the family code of conduct by experimenting with meat-
eating, smoking and petty theft. After an undistinguished school career, he spent
three years in England (1888-91), studying law. Here apart from an initial,
unsuccessful attempt to become an English gentleman’, the only significant
development in his life was his association with the London Vegetarian Society,
which profoundly affected his views on diet; and he showed perfect indifference
to the great intellectual ferment which England witnessed during the 1890s.
Unable to make a mark as a lawyer on his return home, he sailed for South
Africa in 1893, in search of his fortune and discovered his life’s philosophy
instead. His encounter with the severe racial discrimination practised by the
whites against the Indians there— a traumatic experience of which he himself
had the bitter taste more than once—turned the shy and diffident brief-less
barrister, into a brave fighter against injustice and a confident leader of men.
Besides, his world-view developed under the influence of the New Testament,
The Gita, Ruskin’s Unto This Last, Thoreau’s essay on ‘Civil Disobedience’,
Edward Carpenter and Tolstoy. He soon put into practice his political, social and
economic theories by launching Satyagraha movements and making experiments
in community living. The story of how, within five years of his final return to
India in 1915, he became the undisputed leader of the Congress and ultimately
led his country to freedom through a series of Satyagraha compaigns has already
been told. His death by a Hindu fanatic’s bullets in 1948 ended one of the most
significant epochs in modern Indian history. Gandhi’s English writings fall into
three periods. To the brief early London period (1888-91) belong the London
Diary,a chronicle of his sojourn in London, written at the age of nineteen, and
ten brief essays contributed to The Vegetarian and The Vegetarian Messenger on
subjects like ‘Indian Vegetarians’,‘Foods of India’ and ‘Some Indian Festivals’.
To the aftermathof this period may be ascribed the Guide to London written
probably during 1893-94 after his return to India. This essay of 55 pages is a
rather colourless document based on Gandhi’ sown experiences in London.
None of these early writings is marked by any literary distinction. The South
African period (1893-1915) reveals Gandhi blossoming out as a disputationist,
journalist and author. In the pamphlets, ‘An Appeal to Every Briton in South
Africa' (1895),‘The Indian Franchise’(1895) and ‘Grievances of the British
Indians in South Africa’ (1896), Gandhi argues vigorously for the amelioration
of the lot of the South African Indians. The Indian Opinion (published in
Gujarati and English; 1903-14) was the first of the journals launched by him.
Gandhi’s first major work, Hind Swaraj appeared in its columns in 1909.
Originally written in Gujarati, it was translated by the author himself into
English in 1910. Hailed by John Middleton. Murry as ‘one of the spiritual
classics of the world’ and ‘the greatest book that has been written in modern
times’9 and by Gerald Heard as ‘one of those books about which may be said
that they are not so much books as great natural phenomena,’10 Hind Swaraj is a
dialogue in twenty chapters between the Reader and the Writer on the problem
of Indian Independence. The main thrust of Gandhi’s argument is that true
Indian freedom would consist of not merely political emancipation from the
British rule but freedom from the bondage of the modern Western machine
civilization which, according to him, has poisoned the springs of Indian culture.
He singles out for attack the railway system, the professions Of law and
medicine and Western education as powerful agents of this corruption. In
achieving this freedom, the importance of purity of means and the efficacy of
passive resistance of which Swadeshi is a prerequisite are also emphasized.
Gandhi concludes by saying that he bears ‘no enmity towards the English, but
towards their civilization’ and that his life ‘henceforth is dedicated’ to striving
for the Swaraj of his definition. DinA Swaraj is a seminal work, the first direct
statement of the Gandhian doctrines of soul-force, passive resistance,
nonviolence and purity of means. The extremist criticism of the railway system,
lawyers and doctors and British Parliamentary democracy is easily the weakest
part of the argument. It was perhaps this that made Gokhale consider Hind
Swarajas a ‘crude, hastily conceived book’, which the author would withdraw
‘after he had spent a year in his homeland’,11 though as late as 1938 we find
Gandhi maintaining that he saw ‘nothing to make me alter the views expounded
in it.’ Today, the present state of both Western civilization and Indian culture
underscores the essentially prophetic nature of Hind Swaraj.
During the thirtythree years of the Indian period (1915-48), Gandhi ran the two
well-known journals, Young India (1919-32) and Harijan (1933-48), and all his
writings henceforth appeared here in serial form. Most of these were written
originally in Gujarati and were translated, not by the author, but by others into
English, though the translation was mostly revised at places by Gandhi. It is
therefore a moot point whether, unlike Hind Swaraj, they can legitimately form
part of Indian English literature. Among these, his autobiography, The Story of
My Experiments with Truth (Vol. I, 1927; Vol. II, 1928; translated by Mahadev
Desai) is easily the most outstanding. Essentially a spiritual manual as its title
indicates, it is also an absorbing human document, agonizingly frank and
unflinchingly honest in its self-portraiture. Satyagraha in South Africa (1928),
Discourses on the Gita(Gandhi’s interpretation in the light of his own theories of
non-violence and non-attachment, 1930) and From Yeravada Mandir(letters
expounding his teachings, written from prison; 1932) were translated by V.G.
Desai. Later writings include Constructive Programme: Its Meaning and Place (a
blueprint of a comprehensive political, social, economic and cultural
programme, 1941; revised ed., 1945) and Key to Health (a reworking of the
ideas in his Guide to Health in Gujarati, 1906; translated by Sushila Nayar;
1948). Apart from these, there are many historic speeches in English, like the
Benaras Hindu.University Speech of 1916, the speech at the Trial of 1922 etc.,
and several articles in the two journals, including a scathing review of Miss
Mayo’s notorious book, Mother India. An indefatigable and prompt
correspondent, Gandhi has also left behind a large number of letters in
English.The Collected Works edition, begun in 1958, already has more than 75
volumes and is yet to be completed, having brought the story upto the end of
1940 only. The Selected Works (6 vols.) came out in 1968.

Gandhi’s writings are a mine of stimulating thought on political, social,

economic, cultural and spiritual issues. He was no erudite scholar, by no means
an original thinker with a razor- sharp mind, nor a brilliant theoretician. But
solidly grounded in the ancient Indian tradition, he possessed a profound moral
earnestness which enabled him to rediscover the ethical values of this tradition;
and with his convictions supported by similar trends in ancient and modern
Western thought, he boldly applied his findings to the political and social
realities of colonial India. As he himself declared, ’I have presented no new
principles, but tried to restate old principles’; and Ihave nothing new to teach the
world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to
experiment in both on as vast a scale as Icould do.'* A basic element in Gandhi’s
political thought was his faith in the right of every country to evolve a system
best suited to its genius; and in India’s case it was what he called Ramraj, i.e.
‘sovereignty of the people based on pure moral authority’. The ‘Swaraj’ of his
dreams was self-government based on adult franchise, to be attained by
‘educating the masses to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control
authority’. It recognized ‘no race or religious distinction*, nor was it ‘isolated
independence’ but ‘healthy and dignified independence’ making for fruitful
international co-operation. This ‘Swaraj’ could only be attained by the practice
of purely nonviolent means.

Social reform was for Gandhi only an inevitable part of the struggle for true
Swaraj. He believed that ‘social re-ordering and political Swaraj must go hand in
hand’. His social ideal was ‘an equalization of status,’ with class distinctions
being abolished. He championed the cause of women’s freedom, denouncing
child marriage, the dowry system and enforced widowhood. He opposed birth-
control by artificial means and advocated self-control and voluntary chastity
instead. A stern critic of the evil of drinking, he said that Puma Swaraj (complete
independence) was impossible of attainment by people who were slaves of
intoxicating drinks and drugs. He found the British system of education in India
defective in that it was ‘based on a foreign culture to the almost entire exclusion
of indigenous culture’; it ignored ‘the culture of the heart and the hand’, and
confined itself ‘simply to the head’. Its use of a foreign medium was another
great drawback. He advocated free, compulsory and self-supporting education
through the mother tongue—basic education which taught dignity of labour and
led to character-building—and prescribed craft-centred training at the lower
level and education related to ‘national necessities’ at the higher.

In the economic sphere, Gandhi totally rejected the concept of the ‘economic
man’, and refused to divorce economics from ethics. He preached ‘sarvodaya’
(the good of all)—‘ethical socialism’ which was to be achieved through
decentralization of industry, the establishment of rural communities composed of
small, manageable units co-operatively knit together, swadeshi and khadi-
spinning and the implementation of the Tolstoyan doctrine of ‘bread labour’. He
advocated the voluntary acceptance of the idea of ‘trusteeship’ by the capitalists
in order to prevent the economic exploitation of the weaker sections of society.

Gandhi’s ethical and religious philosophy was shaped by the Upanishads, the
Gita and the New Testament and Vaishnavite and Jaina ideals. He subscribed to
(he traditional Hindu doctrine of Varnaskrama dhartna but regarded the varnas
as ‘a healthy division of work and not a rigid caste system. Hence untouchability
for him was ‘a plague which it is the bounden duty of every Hindu to combat.’
He characterized God as ‘Truth and Love’ and religion as ‘the permanent
element in human nature’ which tried to establish ‘the true correspondence
between the Maker and itself’. Hence, 'there is no religion higher than Truth and
Righteousness,’ he declared. The only path to Truth was non-violence which
was ‘the first article’ of his ‘faith’ and ‘the last article’ of his ‘creed’. He held
non-violence to be ‘the law of the human race and ‘infinitely better and superior
to brute ‘force’. It was not the last resort of the coward but the first (and the only
one) of one armed with love, charity and moral strength. It was a power which
could be wielded equally by all, by individuals as well as nations, provided it
was used in the right spirit. The sanctity of means was all-important in achieving
any end and hence non-violence in its purest form was the sovereign weapon in
achieving freedom. He alone who put his faith in Truth and nonviolence
fearlessly in action was the true practitioner of Satyagraha.

During the thirty years that have elapsed since Gandhi’s death, many of his ideas
have been put into practice with remarkable success, both in India and abroad.
Some of them like ‘Panchayat Raj’ have been implemented by the Government,
while Vinoba Bhave’s land-gift movement of the 1950s revived the Gandhian
magic for a time. Outside India, Martin Luther King in the U.S A , and Danilo
Dolci in Sicily have employed the principle of non-violent resistance in the
social sphere with spectacular results; and the idea of trusteeship in industry has
also roused some interest. Some of Gandhi’s tljeoriek like voluntary self-control
in sexual relations and his general view of industrialism may appear to be
utopian now, but there is no denying the enduring vitality of his world-view,
which continues to be relevant to the modern world in several ways, today also.

Gandhi had once wished that his writings should be cremated with his body.
‘What I have done will endure, not what I have said or written,’ he declared. He
had thus no desire to be counted among writers. His purpose in writing was ‘to
propagate my ideas.’ Yet, a mind with a significant world-view held with such
passionate moral conviction could not but be capable of a distinctive individual
voice. His own view of art and literature was strongly influenced by the
moralistic ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin. He believed that ‘all true art must help
the soul to realise its inner self,’ and once observed that ‘the only poem that the
masses need is invigorating food.’ He regarded journalism as a sacred mission
devoted to the pursuit of truth and social service. ‘I cannot write in anger or
malice or even idly, cannot write to excite the passions,’ he said. A newspaper
was for him essentially a ‘views-paper’. Speaking about the Indian opinion, he
claimed, ‘Icannot recall a word in these articles set down without thought or
deliberation, or a word of conscious exaggeration or anything merely to please.’
In contrast to the opulent rhetoric of earlier stalwarts like Surendranath Banerjee
and Pherozshah Mehta, Gandhi used a spare and simple, transparent and
energetic style which eschewed all oratorical flourishes and communicated with
the directness of an arrow hitting its mark. His early style of the London period
is expectedly drab and colourless, for it is the expression of a diffident man
wholly unsure of himself; but the transformation which his character and career
underwent in South Africa lent a new vigour to his style without taking away its
basic simplicity. With maturity also came a gift for homely analogy (e.g. his
description of the charkha as ‘not a new invention (but) a re-discovery, like the
discovery of its own mother by a strayed child’); a happy knack of coining
memorable phrases like ‘Himalayan blunder’, ‘Satanic Government’, ‘poem of
pity’ (description of the cow) and ‘Drain Inspector’s Report’ (apropos of Miss
Mayo’s attack on India), and a Puckish sense of humour (e.g. ‘The woes of
Mahatmas are known only to Mahatmas’). Gandhi’s place among modern Indian
English prose writers is as distinctive as his role in the life of modern India has
been.

From the vast mass of political writing of various shades of thought produced by
men in public life who were Gandhi’s contemporaries, old and young, only a
few works stand out as of more than merely topical interest. Among the authors
of these are prominent associates of Gandhi like Rajagopalachari and Jawaharlal
Nehru; critics of Gandhism such as Subhash

Chandra Bose, M.N. Roy, V.D. Savarkarand B.R. Ambedkar; and socialists like
Jaya Prakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia and Ashok Mehta. Chakravarti
Rajagopalachari (1879-1972), outstanding Congress leader, who occupied
important positions in public life including those of Chief Minister of Madras,
Central Minister and Governor General of India, was noted for his independence
of mind throughout his long and distinguished career. A fearless dissenter, he
had the courage to urge the acceptance of Pakistan in principle at a time when
the very idea of partition was anathema to the Congress, and after Independence,
he became a stern critic of the Nehru government and founded the Swatantra
Party in 1956. The preservation of individual liberty and the encouragement of
free enterprise, the reduction of State control to a desirable minimum, faith in the
efficiency of d arma in regulating individual conduct in society and revulsion at
the rapid corrosion of moral values in postIndependence India were some of the
ideas he stressed in his articles in the Swarajya, the organ of the Swatantra Party.
Among his earlier writings, C ats Behind Bars (1931) and Jail Diary (1941) are
notable. His retelling of the Mahabharata (1951) and the Ramayana (1957),
translated from his own Tamil original substantially by himself has won popular
appreciation; and hisCollected Speeches were published in 1948. Rajaji's
Speeches (Vol. I-II) appeared in 1958. Rajaii who loved English to the point of
characterizing it as the gift of the goddess Saras- wati to India’ wrote a lucid and
firm prose, wiry like the man himself and totally devoid of flabbiness.

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), the political heir of Gandhi, was one of the
greatest leaders produced by the 'Third World’ in modern times. Prime Minister
of India for seventeen years, he played an impressive role in international
politics, though his Anal years were clouded by the debacle caused by the
Chinese invasion of 1962. Only son of Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal, as a child and
an adolescent, gave little evidence Of his future greatness. Educated at Harrow
and Cambridge in England, he returned to India in 1912, an undecided young
man dominated by a strong father. Meeting Gandhi for-the first 'time in 1916,
Jawaharlal soon drew closer to him and found his mission. The challenge of the
Non-Cooperation movement brought out his latent abilities and his rise in the
Congress organization and public estimation was rapid. Twice president of the
Congress, he was jailed seven times for political activity. In addition to his
British education, his tours in Europe in 1926-27 and 1936-38 helped him
acquire an international perspective, which he, among his peers in the Congress,
possessed to the fullest extent. With the advent of Independence in 1947, he
became Prime Minister of India and died in harness in 1964.

An avid reader, Nehru was a tireless public speaker and a prolific writer. His
first book, Soviet Russia (1928) is a collection of sixteen articles comprising
‘some random sketches and impressions* of Russia after his visit there in 1927.
Nehru views Russia as India’s great neighbour from whose political, economic
and social experiments many valuable lessons can be drawn. Letters from a
Father to his Daughter (1930) consists of thirtyone letters written by him in 1928
to his ten year old daughter, and makes a rapid and readable account of the early
history of the world from the making of the earth to the writing of the Ramayana
and theMahabharata. Glimpses of World History (1934), is more ambitious in
scope. Comprising letters written to his daughter from prison during 1930-33,
the book is a survey of world history from the beginnings of civilization to the
nineteen thirties. Hardly a systematic history in the academic sense, it is yet a
fine specimen of the historic vision. Though written without the help of research
tools, it nevertheless shows remarkable accuracy. Unlike most European
historians whose accounts of world history usually concentrate heavily on
Europe, Nehru takes a larger view and builds his narrative round the theme of
the development of human civilization on earth. ‘History teaches us’, he says,
‘of growth and progress and of the possibility of an infinite advance for man.’
The book gives ample evidence of Nehru’s secularism, his scientific temper and
his socialist sympathies. An Autobiography(1936) is easily the crowning
achievement of Nehru as a writer. Written at the age of fortyfive, it is a literary
expression of a man at the height of his powers' In his preface Nehru describes
the book as ‘a sketchy, personal and incomplete account of the past’, but the
Autobiography does present a vivid picture of both the man and his milieu.
Many facets of Nehru's complex personality are revealed here—his scientific
outlook, his aversion to organised religion, his admiration for Marxism and his
fervent nationalism always balanced by a sharp awareness of the larger forces in
world history and their effect on India. An appealing aspectof the book is the
number of glimpses it offers of Nehru’s rich emotional and imaginative nature
and his keen aesthetic sense. In prison, he once nurses a sick puppy with care,
and in Dehra Dun Gaol, the sight of the towering Himalayas soothes his ‘fevered
mind’. The range and variety of quotation in the book reveals a man well read in
several disciplines. Nehru’s transparent sincerity, his objectivity and sense of fair
play and his capacity for unflinching self-analysis are obvipus ip the
Autobiography, as, for instance, when he characterizes himself as ‘a queer
mixture of the East and the West, out of place every where, at home no where,’
and declares towards the close, ’Perhaps what I have written is not so much an
account of what I have been but what I have some times wanted to be or
imagined myself to be.’

Not less vivid than the portrait of the man is the picture of his milieu. The book
is also a living record of the eventful course of Indian history for well over a
generation, unmistakably offering the impression of time constantly on the
march, of events taking shape and changes materializing—in short, a strong
sense of history on the anvil. This picture is all the more vivid because the
narrative is -filled with many pen-portraits of people wh ch reveal Nehru’s
shrewd understanding of human nature (theAutobiography disproves the charge
frequently levelled against Nehru that he did not understand people and was
rather gullible in his personal relationships); his ability to capture the essential
elements in his subject's character; his use of small and concrete details and
interesting anecdotes and his judicious mixture of irony and sympathy. The two
outstanding pen- portraits are easily those of his father and Gandhi and the
perceptive comparison between the two in Chapter XVIII is one of the finest of
its kind in Indian English literature. In contrast with these father-figures which
evoke Nehru’s eloquent admiration, persons like Shymji Krishnavarma and
Mahendra Pratap reveal his sharp ironic sense, tempered by understanding.

The paradox of the Autobiography is that though an extensive work, it remains a

partial portrait, like the autobiographical narratives of Gandhi and Benjamin
Franklin. It does not cover the last and most significant twenty five years of his
life, when the sphere of his activity expanded immensely. Furthermore, even the
narrative of the years actually covered leaves many things unsaid. In spite of a
few moving personal references, Nehru, on the whole, appears to practise a
characteristically British reserve, and perhaps no reader can finish the book
without wishing for a more personal document. Nevertheless, by virtue of its
sincerity and vividness and its manifest historical and literary importance, the
work indubitably ranks among the major autobiographies in world literature.

The Discovery of India (1946) was written in 1944 during his last internment at
Ahmednagar fort. His aim here is to write about the past, as he had done
previously,‘by bringing it in some relation to my present day thoughts and
activities.’ He asks himself the question, ‘What is my inheritance? To what am I
an heir?' and answers the question by declaring: ‘There is a special heritage for
those of us of India... something that is in our flesh and blood and bones, that has
gone to make us what we are and what we are likely to be.’ ‘The thought of this
particular heritage and of its application to the present’ makes Nehru survey the
annals of his country from the Indus Valley Civilization to the nineteen forties.
As in his earlier historical works, what Nehru attempts here is not a scholarly
history but a vision of the past seen through the eyes of one imbued with a lively
historical sense. Nehru's passionate love of India and his faith in the destiny are
tempered by a constant awareness of the cross-currents of world history; and his
commitment to the values of democratic socialism, secularism and humanism is
as firm as ever. He concludes by telling his countrymen that their pride in their
ancient culture and tradition should not be ‘for a romanticized past to which we
want to cling.’ We must co-opetate with other races and nations in common
tasks, and must, while remaining ‘true Indians’, ‘become at the same time good
internationalists and world citizens.’

Numerous collections of Nehru’s speeches, essays, press statements, letters etc.

have been published from time to time. These include Recent Essays and
Writings: on the Future of India, Communalism and other subjects (1934); India
and the World(1936); Eighteen Months in India (1936); The Unity of India:
Collected Writings 1937-1940 (1941); Before and After Independence
(Collected Speeches. 1922-1950) (1950); A Bunch of Old Letters (1958) and
Independence and After (Collected Speeches: 1946-1964) Vols. I-V (1949-
1965). Eleven Volumes of the Selected Works (1970) edited by S. Gopal have
appeared so far,

Nehru’s political thought was shaped by diverse and at times conflicting

influences, including his early training in science, rationalism, the British liberal
tradition, Fabian socialism, Marxism and Gandhism. Both before and after
Independence, he visualised a secular, democratic and socialist society as the
goal before India, and inveighed against bigotry, obscurantism, exploitation,
regimentation and corruption in public life. In the economic sphere he advocated
planned development, a mixed economy and rapid industrialization on a large
scale. Never losing sight of the broader international perspective even during the
days of the national freedom struggle, he became, after Independence, the
foremost exponent of the doctrines of non-alignment and peaceful co-existence
and a spokesman of a viable political philosophy for developing countries. While
his critics argue that a dreamy idealism, a lack of firmness and a fatal tendency
to temporize rendered Nehru largely ineffectual in implementing his programe, it
will be universally conceded that he placed before his country socio-political
ideals designed to set it on the high road to modernity.

Nehru’s prose is a just reflection of the man—sincere and idealistic, urbane and
cultured, vigorous yet graceful—a man endowed with a clear and sharp (though
perhaps not an original) mind, strong emotions, a feeling for beauty and a keen
comic sense. His style is totally free from the periodic ponderousness of many of
the nineteenth century Indians. His prose steers clear of their heavy latinized
diction, their deliberately balanced and complex sentence-structure, and their
magniloquence. His diction is, by and large, simple, but he has a sure feeling for
the apt word and the incisive phrase which gives his writing a remarkable
trenchancy of expression: e.g. his description of Independence as a ‘tryst with
destiny’ and of Gandhi as ‘often the unknown stared at us through his eyes.’
Among Indian masters of English, Nehru is undoubtedly one of the most
outstanding.

The chief works of other notable associates of Gandhi include Vallabhbhai

Patel’s (1875-1950) For a United India: Speeches(1948) and On Indian Problems
(1949); Pattabhi Sita ramayya’s (1880-1959) Gandhism and Socialism (1936)
and History of the Indian National Congress Vols. I and II (1935, 1946);
Rajendra Prasad’s (1884-1963) India Divided (1946) and Speeches(several
volumes, 1952-62); (his Autobiography was translated from Hindi in 1957);
K.M. Munshi’s (1887-1971) I Follow the Mahatma (1940); J.B. Kripalani's
(1888-1982) The Gandhian Way (1945); A'K. Azad’s (1888-1958) Speeches
(1956) and India Wins Freedom India Wins Freedom 1952) Why the Village
Movement (1936) and Gandhian Economic Thought (1951); R.R. Diwakar’s
(1894—) Satyagraha: Its History and Technique (1946); Morarji Desai*s(l896
—) Selected Speeches (1956), The Story of My Life (Vol. I-II, 1974, III, 1979);
G. Ramachandran’s (1904—) A Sheaf of Gandhi Anecdotes (1942); The Man
Gandhi (1943) and Gandhigram: Thoughts and Talks of G. Ramachandran
(1964), and U.R. Dhebhar’s (1905—) Lectures on Gandhian Philosophy (1962).
[Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan Ganga and other works have been rendered into
English by others.]

A prominent Congress leader who rebelled against Gandhi and Gandhism was
Subhash Chandra Bose (1897-1945), whose brave attempt to achieve Indian
independence through armed struggle by organizing the Indian National Army in
East Asia in 1943-45 is one of the brightest chapters in the history of modern
India. His Important Speeches and Writings were edited by J.S. Bright in 1946.
The first volume of his Complete Works (Pub. Division, Govt, of India)
appeared in 1980. His autobiography Indian Pilgrim (1948) was translated From
the Bengali original by S.K. Bose. A Fellow Bengali politician, Manavendra
Nath Roy (Narendranath Bhattacharya) (1886-1954) had an eventful career.
Starting as a terrorist, he became a friend and associate ofLenin in Russia and
was the Founder ofthe Communist Party of Mexico. After a brief flirtation with
the Indian National Congress, he founded the Radical Democratic Party in 1940,
and launched the New Humanism movement

in 1948. A prolific writer, Roy produced no less than sixtyfive books and about
Forty pamphlets. His creed of Radical Humanism, expounded in Mew
Humanism: A Manifesto (1947) claimed to be ‘a logical integration of the
knowledge about the various aspects ofexistence, showing how it is in the nature
ofman to be rational and moral and therefore capable oF building a Free,
harmonious and just social order.'Roy’s was a bold attempt to blend Marxism
with humanist ethics. His autobiographical writings such as Fragments of a
Prisoner's Diary (1941), My Experience in China(1949) and Memoirs (1964) are
no less interesting. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), the chief architect of
independent India’s constitution and the most outstanding leader produced by
the scheduled classes was a stern critic of the Gandhian approach to the
problems of the untouchables as in What Congress and Gandhi have done to the
Untouch- ables (1945). He wrote extensively on political, economic and
religious subjects. His selected speeches have been edited by Bhagwan Das in
Thus Spake Ambedkar (1963). The first volume of his Writings and Speeches
appeared in 1979.

The Hindu Mahasabha, Founded in 1907, was equally critical of Gandhism and
especially of the Congress approach to the Muslims. The preservation of the
territorial integrity of India and of Hindu religion and cultural values were its
chief ideals. These are clearly enunciated in the wiitings of Vinayak Damodar
Savarkar (1883-1966) (Hindu Rashtra Darshan, 1949, etc.). [His The Story of
My Transportation for Life (translated from Marathi, 1950) is a moving account
of his twelve year incarceration in the dreaded Andaman jail]; and in Shyam
Prasad Mookerjee’s (1901-1953) Awake, Hindustan (1944).

Bhai Paramanand’s (1874-1947) The National Movement(1936) has been

translated From the Hindi original by LalChand Dhavan.

The foremost representatives of Muslim reaction to ConThe foremost

representatives of Muslim reaction to Con

1938), M.A. Jinnah (1873-1948) Maulana Muhammad AM (1878-1931), and

Maulana Abdul Ala Maudoodi (1903—). Iqbal, Urdu Poet and religious
philosopher, tried to reinterpret ancient Islamic thought with a view to
demonstrating its universality as well as its essential modernity. His message of
dynamism and action to Indian Muslims made him the prophet of Pakistan. His
Six Lectures on the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam first appeared
in 1930 and was reissued as Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, with
an additional chapter in 1934. Speeches and Statements of Iqbal was published
in 1944.Discourses of Iqbal (1979) is a recent compilation edited by Shahid
Hussain Razzaqi in Lahore, Pakistan. It is a capital stroke of irony that Jinnah,
sometime secretary to Dadabhai Naoroji and friend of Gokhale, was a liberal
leader, until the advent of Gandhi..His Writings and Speeches (1918) gave no
indication that Pakistan was less than thirty years away. Muhammad AM,
prominent Khilafat leader, tried to strike an uneasy balance between a fervent
nationalism on the one hand and ardent Pan Islamism and Muslim revivalism, on
the other. His My Life: A Fragment (1942) and Select Writings and Speeches
(1941). were edited by Afzal Beg. Maulana Maudoodi, founder of Jamat-e-
Islami and author of Nationalism and India (1938) offered the medieval ideal of
the Islamic State as an alternative to political nationalism.

In addition to the early writings of M.N. Roy (already considered), Indian

Communist thought is well represented in S.A. Dange’s (1899—) Gandhi and
Lenin (1921) and India From Primitive Communism to Slavery (1949), and G.
Adhikari’s (ed.)Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India
(Three vols., 1926-79). Prominent among socialist leaders were Acharya
Ngrendra Deva (1889-1936), whose Socialism and the National Revolution was
edited by Yusuf Meherally in 1946 and Jaya Prakash Narayan (1902-1979), who
later spearheaded the movement against the Congress government in 1974-75.
Narayan has written extensively on socialism, Sarvodaya and his ideology of
‘total revolution’in Towards Struggle: Selected Manifestos, ed. Yusuf Meherally
(1946), Socialism, Sarvodaya and Democracy ed. S. Prasad (1964) and Total
Revolution, Vol. I-1V ed. by Brahmanand (1978). Two handy selections are
Towards Revolution edited by G.S. Bhargava and U.N. Phadnis (1975) and The
Challenge of Nation Building edited by Brahmanand (n.d.). Narayan’s Prison
Diary-1975 (1977) is also a highly appealing document. Ram Manohar Lohia
(1910-1967), another outstanding socialist leader, was the enfant terrible of
Indian politics. His early essays appeared in The Congress Socialist (1934-37),
though his Aspects of Socialist Policy (1952) and Marx, Gandhi and
Socialism(1962) were published after Independence. Ashok Mehta (1911—)
who co-authored The Communal Triangle in Indiawith Achyut Patwardhan
(1905—) also wrote Democratic Socialism(1951) and Studies in Asian
Socialism(1956). S.M. Joshi’s (1904—) speeches have appeared in Socialist's
Quest for the Right Path (1970).

Among those of the Liberal-Moderate persuasion some of whose works were

published during this period may be mentioned R.P. Paranjpye (1876-1966),
who wrote The Crux of the Indian Problem (1931) and Rationalism in Practice
(1936), and whoseSelected Writings and Speeches were edited by B.M. Gore in
1940; and C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar (1879-1966). Selections from the Writings
and Speeches of Sachivottama Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar, Diwan of
Travancore Vol. I-II, edited by P.G. Sahasranama Iyer appeared in 1944-45.

Journalism

During Pre-Independence days, journalism was inevitably an effective arm of

the nationalist effort and the ranks of journalists included men like Tilak,
Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose and Motilal Ghosh. Among other distinguished
editors and journalists may be mentioned Sachchidanand Sinha who edited the
Hindustan Review (1899), The Searchlight (1918) and The Indian Nation
(1931); Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, editor of The Hindu from 1905 to 1923; his
equally able son, Kasturi Srinivasan, who continued his father’s tradition (1934-
59), and

B. Shiva Rao, who served The Hindu for thirty years; K. Nata- rajan, editor of
the Indian Social Reformer from 1892 to 1940; G.A. Natesan, who edited the
Indian Review from 1900 to 1947; C. Y. Chintamani (hailed by Srinivasa Sastri
as ‘The Pope of Indian Journalism’), who presided over the destinies of The
Leader from 1909 to 1913 and 1926 to 1941 and wrote Indian Politics since the
Mutiny (1946); Kalinath Ray, editor of The TribUne from 1917 to 1944; Pothan
Joseph, associated with various newspapers including The Bombay Chronicle,
Swarajya, Hindustan Times and The Indian Express, and whose column ‘Over a
Cup of Tea’ was deservedly popular; K. Rama Rao and M. Chalapathi Rau,
successive editors of The National Herald started by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1938;
Khasa Subba Rau, who founded The Swatantra and The Swarajya; S.A. Brelvi,
editor of The Bombay Chronicle (1928-49); S. Sadanand, founder and editor of
the Free Press Journal (1930-53); A.D. Mani, editor of the Hitavada(1936-73);
Devadas Gandhi, editor, Hindustan Times (1940-58), and Durga Das, joint
editor, Hindustan Times (1944-57). G.V. Kripanidhi, editor, Indian News
Chronicle (1947-50) and Frank Moraes, editor The Times of India (1950-57) and
The Indian Express (1958-72) donned the chief editorial mantle after
Independence, though they had considerable experience in the field earlier. The
Modern Review (est. 1907) and The Aryan Path (est. 1929) have been journals
mainly devoted to ideas and values, while Prabuddha Bharata (est. 1896), and
Vedanta Kesari (est. 1914) specialize in spiritual discourse.

History

While politics inevitably claimed much attention, history, which is ‘past

politics’, continued to be analysed and interpreted. The steady efforts of
Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1953), which ranged over four decades resulted in
impressive studies in the Moghul and Maratha periods. These include The
History of Aurangzeb, (Vols. I-V. 1912-24), Shivaji and His Times (1919) and
The Pall of the Mughal Empire (Vols. I-IV, 1932-50). Some other notable
contributions are H.C. Ray Chaudhari’s Political

History of Ancient India (1923); S.N. San's Administrative System of the

Marathas (1923), Military System of the Marathas(1927) and Eighteen
Fiftyseven (1957); K.P. Jayaswal's Hindu Polity (1924); Bal Krishna’s Shivaji
The Great (Vol. 1-IV, 1932-40); A.S. Altekar's Rashtrakutas and Their Times
(1934); K.A. Nilakantha Sastri’s The Cholas (Vols. 1 & If, 1935, 1937);
Radhakumud Mookerji’s Hindu Civilization (1936); G.S. Sar- desai's New
History of the Marathas (Vols. I-HI, 1947) and Main Currents of Maratha
History (1948); K.M. Panikkar’s A Survey of Indian History (1947) and Asia
and Western Dominance: A Survey of Asian History: 1498-1945 (1953); and
R.C. Majumdar’s Corporate Life in Ancient India (1918-22). Majum- dar’s
History of the Freedom Movement in India (Vol. Mil, 1962-63) and the
ambitious History and Culture of the Indian People (Vol. I-XI, 1951-69) edited
by him came much later.

Religious and Philosophical Prose

The most notable writer of religious and philosophical prose of the period is
easily Sarvepally Radhakrishnan (1888-1975), a teacher of philosophy who rose
to be President of India. Born in an orthodox South Indian Brahmin family,
Radhakrishnan grew up as a boy at Tiruttani, a well-known religious centre; and
his studies at Christian institutions like the Lutherian Mission High School,
Tirupati, the Voorhees College, Vellore and Madras Christian College
encouraged him to study critically the Hindu faith in which his birth and
upbringing had grounded him solidly. At the same time, he also felt the impact
of Vivekananda’s thought and eloquence. His M.A. dissertation on The Ethics of
the Vedanta (1908) was a spirited reply to the Western charge that the Vedanta
had no room for Ethics. In another early work, The Philosophy of Rabindranath
Tagore (1918), Radhakrishnan found support for his own views on Hindu ethics
and the extremely complex doctrine of Maya, in the poetry of Tagore.
Radhakrishnan's first major work, The Reign of Religion in Contemporary
Philosophy (1920) was his earliest attempt to examine Western philosophical
thought. Here he argues that the implicit pluralistic theism in the thought of
many modern western philosophers demonstrates the influence of religion on
philosophy. Indian Philosophy (Vols. I-II, 1923, 1927) is Radha- krishnan’s
magnum opus. As a comprehensive and thorough, systematic and readable
account of Indian philosophical thought it hardly has an equal. The Hindu View
of Life (1926) is a forceful vindication of Hinduism as a way of life, an attitude
marked by breadth of vision and tolerance, and refutes the popular notion that it
is only a rigid set of out-moded doctrines and hoary superstitions. Kalki or the
Future of Civilization (1929) emphasizes the perils of mechanization and
standardization in the modern technological civilization and pleads for a world
order based on harmony of the spirit. In An Idealist View of Life (1932)
Radhakrishnan states the fundamentals of his own personal faith. After
considering the modern challenge to religion and modern substitutes for religion,
he examines the nature of religious experience and its affirmations from the
Idealist view-point. East and West in Religion (1933) is a contrastive study of
oriental and occidental values and Eastern Religion and Western Thought (1939)
a fervent plea for toleration. His.later works include Religion and Society
(1947), The Principal Upanishads (1953), and Religion in a Changing World
(1967). Three series of his Occasional Speeches and Writings (1952-56), (1956-
57), (1959-62) have been published and President Radhakrishnan’s Speeches
and Writings appeared in 1965. Recent paperback collections of speeches and
writings includeRecovery of Faith (1967), Religion and Culture (1968), The
Present Crisis of Faith (1970). Our Heritage (1973), The Creative Life (1975),
Living with a Purpose (1976) True Knowledge (1978) and The Pursuit of Truth
(1979). Radhakrishnan : An Anthology(1952) is a representative selection edited
by A.N. Marlow.

Radhakrishnan’s chief achievement is the recognition he won in the western

world for Indian philosophy as a major system of thought. Like Vivekananda, he
was an effective interpreter of Indian thought to the west, but an interpreter who
stood on Vivekananda’s shoulders and enjoyed all the advantages of that
position. The burden of his own world-view is the necessity of faith as a solution
to the confusions of the modern age, a faith both in God and Man and a faith
rational and tolerant. Radhakrishnan’s scholarship, buttressed up by his
phenomenal memory, is profound and accurate, and makes for his frequent use
of apt quotation. A fluent and impressive speaker, he has a style with a distinct
rhetorical cast; yet it is resourceful enough to be capable of both sonorous
grandeur and trenchant simplicity, and periodic opulence and epigrammatic
brevity. He has been accused of interpreting all Indian systems of thought in the
light of his own idealistic monism, and also of offering an inadequate
interpretation of Buddhist thought. There are also occasions when his smooth
succession of sweet-sounding words and phrases almost appears to smother both
argument and logic; nevertheless, he remains a major bridge-builder between
two cultures, a thinker whose basic ideas have urgent relevance to problems of
modern civilization and a distinguished Indian master of English.

Among other signfiicant works on religion and philosophy may be noted P.V.
Kane’s monumental History of Dharmasastra(Vol. I-V, 1930-62), S. N.
Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy (Vol. I-V, 1922-55), R.D. Ranade’s A
Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy (1926), and Mysticism in
Maharash'ra (1930); M. Hiriyanna’s Outlines of Indian Philosophy (1932)
andThe Essentials of Indian Philosophy (1949) and T.L. (Sadhu) Vaswani’s Gita
: Meditations (n.d.).

Biography and Autobiography

Biography and autobiography have always been forms in w hich Indian English
literature is rich. Of the numerous biographies of public men written during the
period, a few stand out by! their literary excellence. These include H.P. Mody’s
Sir Pherozshah Mehta : A Political Biography (1921); N.C. Kelkar’s Landmarks
in Lokmanya's Life (1924); P.C. Ray’s Life and Times of C.R. Das (1927); R.P.
Masani’s Dadabhai Naoroji: The Grand Old Man of India (1939) and D.K.
Roy’s Among the Great(1947).

The authobiographers include men and women from different walks of life.
Apart from the autobiographies already considered, mention may be made of
memoirs by public men like D.K. Karve’s Looking Back (1936) and N.C.
Banerji’s At the Cross-Roads (1950). Autobiographies by revolutionaries
include

Barindrakumar Ghose's The Tale of My Exile (1928), In Andamans: The Indian

Bastille (1939), by B. K. Sinha, who was an associate of Bhagat Singh, and
Leaves from My Diary (1946) by General Mohan Singh of the I.N.A.

Among autobiographies by writers the earliest is Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s Caste

and Outcaste (1923), which describes his boyhood in India and his visit to Japan
and sojourn in the United States of America. Here, as in his novels, Mukerji’s
picture of India is nostalgically romantic. Mulk Raj Anand’s Apology for
Heroism (1946) is a much more objective analysis and remains a valuable aid to
the understanding of his fiction. R.K. Narayan’s My Days was to appear much
later, in 1974. Journalist K. Subba Rao’s Revived Memories was published in
1933.

Other autobiographers include men of God: Swami Ramdas (In Quest of God,
1923); Purohit Swami (An Indian Monk, 1932) and Sitanath Tattvabhushan
(Autobiography, 1942); a scientist (P.C. Ray: Life and Experiences of a Bengali
Chemist, 1932; andAutobiography, 1958); an educationist, who was also a minor
writer (G.K. Chettur : The Last Enchantment, 1933); a railway official (Bhola
Singh : How to Climb the Service Ladder, 1933), and a jurist (Chimhnlal
Setalwad: Recollections and Reflections : An Autobiography, 1946).

Of the six women autobiographers, two are Nehru’s sisters: Vijayalakshmi

Pandit's So l became a Minister and Prison Daysappeared in 1936 and 1945
respectively. Her The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir was published
years later, in 1979. Krishna Huthee Singh wrote With No Regrets (1944) and
We Nehrus (1968). The other four are : Sunity Devi, the Maha- rani of Cooch
Behar (The Autobiography of an Indian Princess, 1921); Cornelia Sorabji, whose
India Calling (1935) and India Recalled (1936) have already been mentioned
earlier; the novelist Santha Rama Rau (Home to India, 1945, and Gifts of
Passage, 1961) and Isvani, a Khoja Muslim, who writes about her girlhood and
youth in The Brocaded Sari (N.Y., 1946—also published under the title, Girl in
Bombay, London, 1947).

Literature of Travel and Essays

Among travel books may be mentioned A.S.P. Ayyar’s An Indian in Western

Europe(Vol. MI, 1929): Lal Mohan’s Travels in the Punjab (1934); Mrs. C.
Kuttan Nair’s A Peep At Europe(1937); S. Natarajan’s West of Suez: An
Account of a Visit to Europe(1938); K.A. Abbas’ Outside India (1939), from
which chapters on the U.S.A. were later published as An Indian Looks at
America (1943), and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya’s Japan, its Weakness and
Strength (1943) and America, the Land of Superlatives(1946). Aruna Asaf Ali's
Travel Talk (1941) is a collection of newspaper articles which combines an
account of the author's peregrinations with reflections on the politics of the day.

Some notable collections of essays are K.S. Venkataramani's humorous sketches

('My Grandmother', ‘My Neighbour* etc.) inPaper Boats (1921) and reflective
pieces (which are less successful) in The Next Rung (1928); S.V.V’s (S.V.
Vijaya- raghavachariar, 1878-1950) Soap Bubbles, More Soap Bubbles, Chaff
and Grain, The Holiday Trip, The Marriage etc., most of which appeared in the
Hindu during the nineteen twenties and the thirties, revealing at places (as in ‘An
Elephant’s Creed in the Court’) a keen eye for the ridiculous (his Mosquitoes at

Mambalam (1958) is in the same vein); N.K. Gupta’s disquisitions on

Aurobindoean thought in The Coming Race (1931) andTowards a New Society;
Iswara K. Dutt’s And All That (1931); D.F. Karaka’s Oh l You English (1935),
ironic sketches of British life; Banaji Wadia’s Random Thoughts and Reflections
(1937), F. Correia Afonso’s witty and readable Plain Living and Plain
Thinking(1940) (his Bread upon the Waters: Selected Speeches and Writings
appeared in 1968); Humayun Kabir’s Of Cabbages

and Kings (1941); N.G. Jog’s Onions and Opinions (1942) and Amarnath Jha’s
Occasional Essays and Addresses (1942).Literary and Art Criticism

A mere trickle in the early years, criticism now becomes a steady, though still a
rather narrow, stream. A contributory factor is the growth in the number of
Indian universities and the increasing implementation of the Ph.D. programme,
though not all Ph.D. dissertations (fortunately or otherwise) found a press.
Criticism of Sanskrit and Prakrit in particular registers some impressive
performances, including N.K. Siddhan- ta’s The Heroic Age of India (1929);
Krishnamachariar’s History of Classical Sanskrit Literature (1937); P.G.
Sahasra- nama Iyer's comparative studies—Tragi-comedy in English and
Sanskrit Dramatic Literature(1933) and The Description of Seasons in English
aid Sanskrit Literature (1942): R.K. Yajnik’s The Indian Theatre (1933), D.R.
Mankad’s Types of Sanskrit Drama (1936); R V. Jagirdar’s Drama in Sanskrit
Literature (1947); Iravati Karve’s Kinship Terms and Family Organization as
found in the Mahabharata (1944) and S.M. Katrc’s Some Problems of Historical
Linguistics in Indo-Aryan(1944) and Prakrit Languages and Their Contribution
to Indian Culture (1945). S.K. De’s History of Sanskrit Poetics (1923, 1925, rev.
ed. 1960) and V. Raghavan’s The Number of Rasas (1940) and Studies on Some
Concepts of Alamkara Sastra (1942) are notable theoretical discussions.

Criticism of literature in the Indian languages has also developed considerably,

most of the Indian languages being represented. Among such studies are
Rambabu Saksena’s A History of Urdu Literature (1927); Mohan Singh’s A
History of Punjabi Literature: 1100-1930 (1931); P. Sen’s Western Influence in
Bengali Literature (1947) and Modern Oriya Literature(1947); K.M. Munshi's
Gujarat and Its Literature (1935); G.C. Bhate’s History of Modern Marathi
Literature (1939); R. Narasimha- charya’s History of Kannada Literature (1940):
P.T. Raju’s Telugu Literature (1944); K.R. Pisharoti’s Kerala Theatre (1932) and
M.S.P. Pillai's Tamil Literature (1929).

Criticism of English literature, however, continues to remain sporadic.

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan period seem to receive the most attention. Here
we have Amarnath Jha’s Shakespearean Comedy and other Studies (1930); V.K.
Ayappan Pillai’s Shakespeare Criticism from the Beginning to 1765 (1932);
Ranjee Shahani’s Shakespeare Through Eastern Eyes (1932); C. Narayana
Menon’s Shakespeare Criticism: An Essay in Synthesis (1938); M.
Bhattacharya’s Studies in Spenser (1929) andKeats and Spenser (1944) and B.
Rajan’s Paradise Lost arid the Seventeenth Century Reader (1947). The
eighteenth century does not yet appear to interest the Indian scholar; the
Romantics are rather surprisingly meagrely represented in Amiyakumar Sen’s
Studies in Shelley (1937) and the Victorians in Sudhindra Nath Ghose’s Rossetti
and Contemporary Criticism (1928). The few studies of twentieth century
literature include Amiya Chakra- varty’s The Dynasts and the Post-War Age of
Poetry (1938), A.C. Bose’s Three Mystic Poers: A Study of W.B. Yeats, AE and
Rabindranath Tagore (1945); K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s Lytton Strachey: A
Critical Study (1938) and Bhavani Shankar’s Studies in Modern English Poetry
(1939). American literature has attracted a solitary critic: V. Ramakrishna Rao’s
Emerson, His Muse and Message appeared in 1938.

Bhupal Singh’s A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction (1934) clubs together British

writers on Indian subjects with Indian English writers, whose works begin to be
studied increasingly during this period. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s pioneering
surveys—Indo Anglian Literature (1943) and Indian Contribution to English
Literature (1945) appeared before Independence, though his comprehensive
Indian Writing in English was to be published later in 1962. The first substantial
critical survey of Indian English poetry is Lotika Basu’s Indian Writers of
English Verse (1933). More selective is Mulk Raj Anand’s The Golden Breath:
Studies

in Five Poets of New India (1933) which includes a consideration of Tagore,

Sarojini Naidu and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya. Harihar Das’s Life and
Letters of Toru Dutt (1921) is an early appreciation, while Manjeri S. Isvaran’s
Venkataramani, Writer, and Thinker(1932) is an assessment of fellow writer.
D.P.Mukerji’s Rabindranath Tagore: A Study appeared in 1943. Two studies of
Sri Aurobindo by disciples are K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s Sri Aurobindo (1945)
and K.D. Sethna’s The Poetic Genius of Sri Aurobindo (1947).

Theoretical criticism still remains a neglected area, though the few examples
found indicate considerable potentialities: V.K. Krishna Menon’s A Theory of
Laughter with special Relation to Comedy and Tragedy (1931); P.K. Guha’s
Tragic Relief (1932); B.S. Mardhekar’s Arts and Man (1940) and Two Lectures
on an Aesthetic of Literature (1944); Humayun Kabir’s Poetry, Monads and
Society (1941); and K.P. Srinivasa Iyengar’s On

Beauty (Five Lectures) (1945).

Notable examples of art criticism are G.H. Ranade’s Hindustani Music (1938),
P. Sambamoorthy’s South Indian Music (Vol. I-IV, 1941), Mulk Raj Anand's
The Hindu View of Art (1933), K. Khandalavala’s Indian Sculpture and Painting
(1938), Nihar Ranjan Ray’s Maurya and Sunga Art (1945) and Ragini Devi’s
Nrityanjali: An Introduction to Hindu Dancing (1928).
Poetry
Unlike prose, the poetry of this period gives no evidence of any new major
voices, the most significant verse being produced by earlier poets like Sri
Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore, who had consolidated their reputation
before the advent of the Gandhian age. In fact, as already pointed out, it is
surprising that the impact of the Gandhian whirlwind produced no outstanding
poetry of any kind, though numerically the poetic scene remains as thickly
populated as earlier.

These writers of verse may conveniently be considered in two groups-

practitioners of religious, mystical, philosophical, reflective verse, including the
disciples of Sri Aurobindo, and poets mainly in the Romantic-Victorian
tradition, who have a wider range of themes and who occasionally also try,
rather halfheartedly, to 'experiment with modernism. The two groups are
obviously not mutually exclusive, since the romantic banner flutters equally
prominently over the heads of the poets of the first group also.

To the school of Sri Aurobindo belong K..D. Sethna (The Secret Splendour
(1941), Punjalal (Lotus Petals, 1943), Nolini Kanta Gupta (To The Heights,
1944), Nirodbaran (Sun-Blossoms, 1947) and Nishikanto (Dream Cadences,
1947). Their verse faithfully echoes the master in theme and sentiment, diction
and imagery, but hardly succeeds in transmuting the echo into individual voice.
Of the writers of religious-philosophical verse in general, J. Krishnamurti is one
of the most notable, albeit for reasons not predominantly literary. A child
prodigy, a protege of Annie Besant and’ sometime head of the international
organization, the Order of the Star of East, he enjoyed a considerable following.
His The Search (1927) and The Immortal Friend(1928) contain religious
musings in free verse in which the poetic accent is less authentic than the
message. This must also be said of Swami Paramananda’s The Vigil (1923),
Swami Ram Tirtha’s Poems of Rama (1924), and T.L. Vaswani’s Quest (1928).
Brajendra Nath Seal’s The Quest Eternal (1936) is an ambitious attempt to
’transcribe basic philosophical ideas in forms of pure poetry’ and to apply ‘the
synthetic vision’ to the pageant of ‘universal history’. The three phases of the
quest are Ancient, Medieval and Modern, represented by a Greek priest, a
medieval knight and a modern wanderer respectively. Each quest is intended to
be a presentation of the imaginative apprehension of ‘the Soul of an age.. .its
universe- idea and its God-consciousness, viewed from the standpoint of the
living problems of today.’ The long poem employs a variety of metres ranging
from double-rhyme stanzas to free verse, the diction and imagery being almost
uniformly Romantic-Victorian. The Quest Eternalis The Testament of Beauty of
Indian English poetry, and even like Bridges’ poem, it can hardly be said to have
negotiated the difficult leap from perfectly unimpeachable versified philosophy
to major philosophical poetry. The same is true of K.S. Venkataramani’s On the
Sand-Dunes (1923), in which the serious philosophical reflections in free verse
seldom attain the higher regions of felt thought.

Those who derive their light mainly from the sun of British Romanticism form a
much larger group, many of them being academicians of note. G.K. Chettur
(1898-1936) published five collections of verse including Sounds and Images
(1921), The Temple Tank and other Poems (1932) and The Shadow of God
(1934). The Sonnet was his favourite plot of ground and he tried to till its
exhausted soil with unavailing application. His brother, S.K. Chettur (1905-
1973), brought out a solitary collection: Golden Stair and other Poems (1967).
Armando Menezes (1902 -) experimented with the mock-epic in The Fund
(1923) and satire inThe Emigrant (1933) before he found his lyrical voice in
Chords and Discords (1936), Chaos and Dancing Star (1946) and The Ancestral
Face (1951). His Selected Poems appeared in 1969. The opening poem of this
representative selection, ‘Ode to Beauty’, is suggestive of the thematic
preoccupationa of the poet. Though capable of both a delicate lyrical note as in
‘Aspiration’ and genuine wit as in ‘Chairs’, he has not been able to sustain these
at the highest level of creativity; but his sense of rhythm remains unerring
throughout. V.N. Bhushan's (1909-51) eight verse collections between
Silhouettes (1928) and The Far Ascent(1948) are, in spite of their bustling
enthusiasm, uniformly marred by romantic cliches and Victorian moralising. He
has a better claim to our remembrance as an early champion of Indian English
literature, who edited three representative anthologies: The Peacock Lute (1945)
(poetry), The Moving Finger (1945) (critical essays), and The Blazing Shrine
(1946) (one-act plays). Manjeri S. Isvaran (1910-68), better known as a short
story writer, published ten slender collections of verse, the first of which was
Saffron and Gold and Other Poems (1932) and the last The 'Neem is a Lady
(1957). The sources of his inspiration are obvious from his own description of
his poems in his preface to Catguts (1940) as ‘sparks in the emotive blood’, and
in his last col'ection he advises the poet ‘to put into your head/Some heart’ (‘To
a Highbrow Poet’). He occasionally achieves a cameo effect in lyrics like
‘Dewdrop, Teardrop’; but his taste is so unsure that he allows himself an echo
like ‘Little pigeons/Beating in the void their ridiculous wings in vain’. Similarly,
after describing a widow watching the traffic (her eyes are like ‘twin balls of
fire’), he informs us in all possible seriousness that the husband was ‘a kindly
cheerful fuss/Alas, he died under a bus’ (‘At the Window’). Obviously out of
tune with the poetic revolution ushered in by Eliot and Pound, he complained as
late as 1957 that modern poetry is ‘wrought like a lock’ and its key‘cast into the
middle of the sea’ (‘The Poet and His Public’). His refusal to come out of his
romantic cocoon spelled the end of Tsvaran’s poetic development. P.R.
Kaikini’s (1912—) nine verse collections from Flower Offerings: Prose poems
on Truth, Beauty and Nature (1943) to Poems of The Passionate East (1947)
reveal an enthusiastic but psittaceous eclecticism. His verse sports numerous
echoes from ' the Romantics, Tagore, T.S. Eliot (e.g., ‘Nocturne’), the poets of
the 1930s (e.g., ‘The Millionaire') etc. The result is mostly clever pastiche, rather
than a strong, individual utterance, notwithstanding the assurance with which
Kaikini handles language. Humayun Kabir’s Poems (1932) and Mahatma and
Other Poems (1944) are consistently marred by conventional imagery and faded
diction. A poet who employs the phrase ‘sands of time’ as late as 1944
(‘Mahatma’) only reveals how completely out of aesthetic step he is with his
times.

Among other writers of verse of the period may be mentioned K.S.R. Sastry
(The Epic of Indian Womanhood, 1921; The Light of Life, 1939), N.M.
Chatterjee (Parvati, 1922; India and Other Sonnets, 1923); A. Christina Albers
(Ancient Tales of Hindustan, 1922; Himalayan Whispers, 1926); D. Madhava
Rao (Madhavi-Lata, 1923); S.L. Chordia (Seeking and Other Poems,1925;
Chitor and other Poems, 1928); M.U. Malkani and T.H. Adavani (The Longing
Lute, 1925); M. Krishnamurti (Songs of Rose Leaves, 1927; Love Sonnets and
Other Poems, 1937), Uma S. Maheshwer (Among The Silences, 1928; Southern
Idylls, 1939). J.R.P. Mody (Golden Harvest, 1932; Verses, Grave and Gay,
1938), Nilima Devi (The Hidden Face, 1936); Subho Tagore(Peacock Plumes,
1936; May Day and other Poems, 1945), Bal- doon Dhingra (Symphony of
Love, 1938; Comes Ever the Dawn,1941), S R. Dongerkery (The Ivory Tower,
1943), Fredoon Kabraji

(A Minor Georgian's Swan Song,, 1944), H.D. Sethna (Struggling Heights,

1944), and Serapia Devi (A Book of Beneficent Grief and Other Poems, 1945;
Rapid Visions, 1947).
Drama
As for poetry, for drama also this is, on the whole, a rather lean period, though
the actual number of plays written is by no means small. As in the earlier period,
there are only a handful of playwrights who engaged themselves in sustained
activity, the rest remaining content with a contribution or two each.

A.S. Panchapakesa Ayyar (1899-1963) wrote half a dozen plays, the first of
which was In the Clutch of the Devil (1926) and the last The Trial of Science for
the Murder of Humanity (1942). Two collections of his plays are Sita's Choice
and other Plays(1935) and The Slave of Ideas and Other Plays (1941). Ayyar’s
themes are overtly reformistic. In Sita's Choice, the young widow of a
consumptive old man finds fulfilment in a bold remarriage to a reformist youth,
though the author is tactful enough to pack the couple ofT to distant Iraq after
the wedding. The Slave of Ideas has a rather melodramatic plot built round the
clash between a young lawyer with spiritual leanings and his materialistic wife,
culminating in her infidelity, which he avenges by murdering her. Ayyar tries to
invest the melodrama with ethical and social purpose by posing questions such
as forgiveness of wrongs and rights of women. The ungodly and superstitious
practices involving witchcraft and ritualistic murder current in contemporary
rural South India form the central motif in In The Clutch of The Devil. The
allegory in the The Trial of Science for the Murder of Humanity is evident from
the title itself In Ayyar’s plays plot and characterization are both subordinated to
the message', which is often couched in stilted dialogue.

Thyagaraja Paramasiva Kailasam (1885-1946) who wrot e both in English and

Kannada (and sometimes mixed the two up, himself calling the result
‘Kannadanglo’ in his Kannada plays) was a remarkable man—scientist, linguist,
sportsman, wit, actor, playwright and bohemian. Trained as a geologist, he
resigned from Government service at the age of thirtyfive, remaining for the rest
of his life both ‘unemployed and unemployable’, in his own words. His punning
version of his own name ‘Typical-assam’ and his witty self-description ‘a black
spot in a white house’ are well-known. Kailasam published four English plays in
his life time. A fifth, taken down by a friend from the playwright’s recitation,
was published posthumously; and it is reported that he had composed and recited
to friends (a usual practice with him) almost a dozen plays which he never,
actually committed to paper. Of the three plays in Little Lays and Plays (1933),
The Burden and Fulfilment are one-act plays in prose. The former shows
Bharata’s reaction to the sudden news of his father’s death, Rama’s banishment
and his own consequent elevation to kingship. The ethical problems posed by
these cataclysmic developments are suggested effectively. In Fulfilment, the
single incident of Krishna’s failure to persuade young Ekalavya, the archer, from
joining the Kauravas, which leads him to stab the youth to death, is made to raise
funda

mental questions about life and death, good and evil, and means and ends.
Finally, Krishna who firmly believes that the high end justifies low means,
emerges as a mysterious dixine figure in whose hands, foe and friends alike are
only puppets. A Monologue: Don't Cry, the third play in the collection is a slight
work.

It is a conventionally allegorical presentation of the sorrows of Woman, whose

life from childhood to youth is shown to be an odyssey of loss, culminating in
widowhood.

Kama or The Brahmin’s Curse (1946) is the only full length play in verse and
prose published by Kailasam in his life time. As the sub-title, ‘An impression of
Sophocles in five acts’ indicates, the play is built round the idea of a fatal curse:
in this case, the curse of the guru he has deceived, which dogs Kama to the end
of his days. The play ends with another curse which is a capital stroke of tragic
irony. Aswatthaama, bent on avenging Kama’s mortal wound, curses the house
of Pandu, without realizing that Kama himself is a scion (though illegitimate) of
that very house. The play is almost a Mnhabharata in miniature, depicting some
prominent /incidents in the epic, though Kailasam takes many liberties with the
original. In spite of its sub-title, Kama is more Elizabathan than Greek in spirit
and expression. Keechaka (1949), available in the version reportedly prepared
from Kailasam’s' recitations makes a bold departure from mythological
stereotypes by projecting the lascivious Keechaka of legend as a noble hero truly
in love with Draupadi and Bhima as the villain of the piece. Plays which
Kailasam never wrote down but partly composed orally and recited (some times
spontaneously) to friends from time to time reportedly included Bhisma's Last
Night, The Fear (on Markandeya), The Torture (on Harischandra), The Vow (on
Dronacharya and Drupada), The Remorse (on Rama and Sita), Abnegation (on
Bhima), Trishanku and Renuka.

Kailasam chooses his subjects from ancient epics but does not rest content with
merely copying the original. He brings a challengingly individual approach to
bear upon the mythological personages he portrays. A champion of the
underdog, he exalts the lowly forester Ekalavya at the cost of Prince Arjuna;
sides with Keechaka, who is no match for the mighty Bhima and ennobles
Kama, glossing over all his Tailings. Furthermore, he handles his plots in such a
way that his plays come to have an apex of ethical import, though unlike Ayyar
he does not resort to machine-made moralising. A born actor himself [he once
mockingly gave himself the title, Vidhava-abhinaya-Visarada (skilled in playing
the widow's role) apropos of his acting in his Kannada plays] he has a sure sense
of the theatre. But a total proneness to sentimentality dogs almost all his plays,
espe-cially Karna (the hero repeatedly weeping on his own shoulder and calling
himself, ‘poor, poor Anga!'), and the ghost of Shakespeare haunts his theatre as
disastrously as it did Sri Aurobindo’s. Thus, Bharata’s mental conflict in The
Burden is couched in terms of Hamlet’s and Kama’s speech in the assembly
echoes Antony’s oration. Kailasam’s greatest weakness, however, is ironically
enough, his style, though he had an excellent command of the language. His
exuberance makes both his prose and verse equally rhetorical and pseudo-poetic.
The dramatic verse, needlessly riddled with archaisms like ‘forsooth’ and ‘list’
lacks both the fluency of Sri Aurobindo and the rhythmical grace of
Harindranath Chatlopadhyaya, and the prose sounds occasionally as if it were an
unconscious parody of euphuism, as in ‘Blessings, my budding bowman. But
you will never bloom into a better until you better the bearing of your body
whilst at bow-craft’ (Bhisma to Arjuna in The Purpose). It is also a pity that, like
Sarojini Naidu in her poetry, Kailasam too gave no expression to his sharp comic
sense in his English plays, though his Kannada writings are naturally the richer
for it.

Bharati Sarabhai’s (1912—) two plays— The Well of The People (1943) and
Two Women (1952)—show a distinct impact of Gandhian thought and the first
one, in special, is easily one of the most typical products of the Gandhian age.
The reviewer who began his review of the play with ‘Well, well, well,’ certainly
allowed his critical sense to be smothered by his wit, for The Well of the People
is one of the very few successful Indian English plays. Based on a true story
published in Gandhi’s Harijan, it is a verse play about an old widow who,
becoming lame and unable to go on a pilgrimage to Benaras and have a dip

in the sacred Ganga, decides to spend her money in getting a well dug for the
untouchables in her village, instead. She says, ‘I may not see Benaras, God does
not/Push a sick vessel like this body to/Each port of earthly pilgrimage.. ./But
my soul, my free swan, can bring inland/On a small well, with water pure as
Mother Ganga, the merit lost.’ The play is an effective dramatisation of how
during the Gandhian age a new social awareness fused itself with the age-old
religious consciousness, thus leading to a resurgence of the spirit. Appropriately
cast in the mould of the imaginative drama of Maeterlinck, Yeats and Tagore,
The Well of the People employs symbolic characters. The old woman herself is
India, ‘she is you, you and all of us’, and the choruses of the women, the
peasants and the Gandhian workers have also an obvious symbolic purpose. It is
in style — that weakest link in the chain of Indian English drama—that the play
is at its strongest. Sarabhai’s verse, unaffected and energetic, eschews poeticisms
and makes frequent use of speech rhythms. Colourful Indian imagery is used but
without the slightest trace of self-consciousness.

Two Women is, however, a sad anti-climax. The two women in this prose play
are Anuradha, a typical Hindu wife unhappily married to a westernized husband,
and her friend Urvashi, an unattached singer and dancer. They both decide to
renounce the world and go to the Himalayas; but Anuradha comes to know that
her husband is afflicted with a mortal disease and realizes that the Himalayas
will provide only escape but no peace, and Urvashi falls in love and feels that
her life is now fulfilled. The two women finally accept the message of the Gitc
that the only way to moksha is doing one’s duty in one s station in life in a calm,
unattached manner. The form of realistic prose drama was hardly suitable for a
theme of this nature and (he long speeches by characters in ‘poetic prose’ (e.g.
‘staring at us like a sea-bird, young and still, whitened, huddled in the
background’: Urvashi’s description of Darshan) appear out of tune with the
social setting.

Of Joseph Mathias Lobo-Prabhu's more than a dozen plays, some like Mother of
New India : A Play of the Indian village in three Acts (1944) and Death
Abdicates (1945) appeared before Independence, though his Collected Plays was
published in 1956. All the six plays in this volume betray the author’s weakness
for melodrama and play after play sports guns, poison, accident, suicide, and
murder. Apes in the Parlour deals with the theft of a precious stone from a
temple by a cinema actress who is then murdered. In The Family Cage, the tragic
theme of leprosy is treated in an unconvincing manner, with all kinds of
coincidences tying the action into knots, until finally the protagoinst is suddenly
declared cured. Flags of the Heart, is a sentimental presentation of love thwarted
by caste, with a dash of terrorism deepening its already garish colours. In
Winding Ways, all the talk of the ‘Christian ethic of love’ and the ‘Hindu ethic
of detachment* rings hopelessy false, since it is tagged on to a creaking plot
built on the hoary device cf a guilty secret in the past. Love Becomes Light,
which sports the same device, opens with a revealing stage direction: ‘Roshan
has a pistol which he fires frequently to punctuate his conversation.’ The last
play, Dog’s Ghost: A play for Non-vegetarians reads like a completely
unintentional burlesque of Gandhian non-violence. The protagonist has run over
a pariah dog and seeks to expiate his sin by confessing to the murder of his
sister, who, he suspects, has been killed by his brother-in-law. Lobo-Prabhu's
characters are paste-board and his dialogue is full of poeticisms and play upon
words.

Curiously enough, quite a few writers who won their reputation in other forms of
writing are also seen to have tried their hand at drama, though with no
conspicuous success. The first published work of the novelist, Sudhindra Nath
Ghose was Colours of a Great City : Two Playlets—The Defaulters and And
Pippa Dances (1924). He has also left a number of unpublished plays, including
Antigone and A Leap Year Comes But Once in Four.11 V.N. Bhusan’s
Samyukta and Mortal Coils appeared in 1930 and 1934 respectively, and
Armando Menezes’ social comedy, Caste in 1938. R.K. Narayan’s own
dramatization of his short story : ‘The Watchman’ was published under the title
The Watchman of The Lake (1940) and it is also on record that K.R., Srinivasa
Iyengar wrote two plays : Suniti and Her Spouse or The Storm in a Tea-cup
(1942) and The Battle of the Optionals (1943).

Some of the other plays published include P.K. Bosu's Conrad and Leonora
(1921) and Rustum and Zulekha (1921); V. Narayanan’s Where God is Not and
other Playlets (1933); Shridhar Pande’s Plays (a collection of three plays, 1935);
Hemchandra Joshi’s Plays for the Young (1936) and Cupid in Slums, God on the
Pavement and Twin Souls (all n.d.); Abdul Mi's The Land of Twilight (1937)
and Two Plays—The Rebel and The Imperialist (1944); R.S. Fyzee’s Invented
Gods (1938) and Daughter of Ind (1940); D.M. Borgaonkar’s Image Breakers
(1938) and One Act Plays (1957); Imam Sayed Mehdi’s Scenes from Indian
Mythology (1940) and Scenes from Islamic History (1940); Sivananda Saraswati
Swami’s Brahmacharya (1940); Divine Life (1943), Radha's Prem (n.d.) and
Saint Alavander or The King's Quest of God (1947); Balwant Gargi’s The
Vulture and other Plays (1941) and The Knife (1971); A.S. Raman's The
Daughter, Drona and The Gardener (all translated from his Telugu original by
the author, 1943) and Charity Hospital (1944); Baldoon Dhingra’s For Heaven is
Here (1944) and The Awakening (1945); P.A. Krishnaswamy’s Kailash (1944)
and The Flute of Krishna (1950); Mrinalini Sarabhai’s The Captive Soil (1945)
and Vichaar(1970); Purushottam Trikamdas’s Sauce for the Goose (1946) and
Oh, Hell (1947) and Avyaktananda Swami’s Ten Short Plays(1947). As for
single plays by stray authors, their number is large enough to preclude even the
courtesy of inventory treatment, the right place for them being a standard
bibliography.
Fiction
The Novel

As already noted, the Indian English novel of the period was deeply influenced
by the epoch-making political, social and ideological ferment caused by the
Gandhian movement. The fiction of K..S. Venkataramani (1891-1951),
chronologically one of the earliest novelists of the period, is a copy-book
example of this. His first novel, Murugan, The Tiller (1927), contrasts the
careers of two young south Indian friends— Kedari, a flashy materialist finally
ruined by his own chicanery, and Ramu, an introvert, whose spirit of public
service brings him spectacular rewards after an unpromising beginning. The
novel ends with Ramu’s founding of an ideal rural colony on Gandhian
principles to which he retires with his repentant friend. Artless in technique,
Murugan, The Tiller with its one-dimensional characters is more of a tract than' a
novel. The impress of Gandhism is even stronger on Venkataramani’s second
novel, Kandan, the Patriot: A Novel of New India in the Making (1932). Set
against the background of the Civil Disobedience movement of the nineteen
thirties, the novel tells the story of Kandan, an Oxford-educated Indian youth,
who resigns from the Indian Civil Service to plunge into the freedom struggle
and finally succumbs to a police-bullet. Unfortunately, Venkataramani’s story is
far more contemporary than his fictional technique. His hero has a prophetic
dream before he dies and makes a long speech of patriotic exhortation on his
death-bed; Ponnan, the Governmet spy is suddenly revealed to be the long-lost
brother of the beautiful Kamakshi (He had been kidnapped by bear- dancers as a
boy!), and chapter XIV opens with: ‘Kind reader, we have to go back a little.’

A.S.P. Ayyar, the dramatist, was a member of the Indian Civil Service and could
hardly write a Gandhian novel with impunity. His clever solution was to go back
to ancient Indian history (he was a historian by training) and that this was a
deliberate strategy is indicated by a remark in his introduction to his second
novel, Three Men of Destiny (p. vii). ‘Nothing is more appropriate in the present
glorious renaissance period of Iqdia, when Eastern and Western ideas are stirring
the people into various kinds of political, artistic and religious expression
peculiarly their own than depicting the story of the time when India first came
into violent contact with the greatest and most civilized nation in Europe then,
the Greeks.’ Ayyar’s first novel, Baladitya (1930) is set in fifth century India and
narrates the story of the defeat of the invading Huns by Baladitya, the King of
Magadha and Yasodharman, the King of Mahakosala. It is a sprawling chronicle
with about seventyfive characters and Ayyar’s penchant for social reform (also
revealed in his plays) punctuates the narrative with frequent homilies on the evils
of the caste system, pseudo-religiosity etc.Three Men of Destiny (1939) is cast in
the same mould. The three men are Alexander the Great, Chandragupta Maurya,
the Indian emperor and Chanakya, his Brahmin Prime Minister, the background
being Alexander’s invasion of India in the fourth century B.C., and its aftermath.
The list of characters comprises 145 men and 18 women. Ayyar later split this
large novel into two parts and published them separately with some revision as
The Legions Thunder Past (1947) and Chanakya and Chandragupta(1951).
Ayyar’s fictional technique, like Venkataramani’s, is totally unaifected by
twentieth century models.

A fellow Tamil, Krishnaswamy Nagarajan (1893—) wrote two novels which

stand head and shoulders above the work of both Venkataramani and Ayyar.
Athavar House (1937) is a Gals- worthian family chronicle dealing with an old
Maharashtrian Vaishnava Brahmin family settled in the south for generations.
The action, spread over almost a generation, covers the economic vicissitudes in
the life of the joint family, the ferment of the Gandhian age, the stresses and
strains of complex family relationships and the inevitable clash between
orthodoxy and new ideas. An authentic picture, drawn with great understanding
and sympathy, of a social phenomenon now fast vanishing from the Indian
scene, this joint family chronicle is one of the best of its kind in Indian English
fiction. In a later novel, Chronicles of Kedaram (1961), Nagarajan seasons his
realism with a sharp sense of irony. This is a picture of life in a Coromandel
coast town during the nineteen thirties drawn by an insider who tempers his
intimate knowledge with an objectivity more to be expected of an outsider. The
manners and morals of the small town set, its petty religious feuds (in one of
which Gandhiji himself has to mediate), the little storms in its tiny social tea-
cups, the flutter in its dovecotes caused by the Gandhian whirlwind and the
inevitable inroads made by reform into conservativism—are all evocatively
brought out.

The m ost significant event in the history of Indian English fiction in the ninteen
thirties was the appearance on the scene of its major trio: Mulk Raj Anand, R.K.
Narayan and Raja Rao, whose first novels were published in 1935, 1935 and
1938 respectively; and it is a mark of their stature that they revealed, each in his
own characteristic way, the various possibilities of Indian English fiction. Mulk
Raj Anand (1905—), the eldest of the three, has also been the most prolific.
Born in Peshawar (now in Pakistan), in a Hindu coppersmith family, Anand has
narrated the story of his upbringing in the autobiographical Apology for Heroism
(1946). ‘I grew up,’he says, ‘like most of my contemporaries, a very superficial,
ill-educated young man, without any bearings,’13 since the education of those
days glorified western culture at the expense of the Indian tradition. Two critical
illnesses during early years had given the boy a reflective turn of mind which
was counterbalanced by his native Punjabi realism and activism. Participating in
the Gandhian movement while at college, he suffered a brief imprisonment. He
sailed for England for doing research in philosophy in 1924; there, he became
intrested in the study of Indian art and also came in touch with avant garde
movements and left wing politics and even joined the International Brigade
during the Spanish Civil War. On his return home, he founded in 1946 the art
magazine Marg, which he continues to edit. Endowed with apparently
inexhaustible energies, Anand is an indefatigable traveller and is actively
associated with numerous literary and cultural associations both in India and
abroad, besides engaging himself in social work.

Anand’s fiction has been shaped by what he himself calls ‘the double burden on
my shoulders, the Alps of the European tradition and the Himalaya of my Indian
past.’14 To his Indian past, however, Anand’s attitude is ambivalent. On the one
hand, he is indignantly critical of the deadwood of the hoary Indian tradition—
its obscurantism and fossilization; on the other, as his lifelong interest in ancient
Indian art and the intuitive understanding of the Indian peasant mind in his
writings indicate, he is equally aware of its finer and enduring aspects as well.
And it is mainly from the European tradition that Anand derives his fervent
socialist faith and his vision of a modern egalitarian society. Anand’s numerous
novels form a fictional chronicle in which his eclectic humanism and his hu-
manitarian compassion for the underdog are persistent themes.

Both these themes receive perhaps their best fictional treatment in Anand's first
novel, Untouchable (1935), which describes an eventful day in the life of Bakha,
a young sweeper from the outcastes’ colony of a north Indian cantonment town.
This particular day brings him his daily torments and more but in the end it also
suggests three alternative solutions to his problem: A missionary tries to
persuade him to embrace Christianity; he listens to Gandhiji, who advocates
social reform; and he also hears of mechanized sanitation as the only answer
possible. The novel ends with Bakha 'thinking of everything he had heard,
though he could not understand it all.’ Anand’s treatment of his theme here is
remarkably objective and restrained, which saves the book from the lush
sentimentality which mars some of his later novels. Unsparing in its realism,
Untouchable is also structurally the least flawed of all Anand’s novels. Apart
from the long harangue on modern sanitation at the end, the entire narrative is a
thing of perfect unity and finish.

In his two chronicles of coolies— Coolie (1936) and Two Leaves and a Bud
(1937), Anand turns to the lot of another class of the under-privileged. The range
and scope of his fiction have now widened and his canvas expanded, and there is
also an orchestration of themes which are barely hinted at in Untouchable-
themes such as the contrast between rural and urban India and race-relations.
Coolie is the pathetic odyssey of Munoo, an orphaned village boy from the
Kangra hills, who sets out in search of a livelihood. His several roles, including
those of a domestic servant, a coolie, a factory worker and a rickshaw-puller,
take him to various places from Bombay to Simla, until swift consumption
brings his struggles to an untimely,end. The novel is an indignant comment on
the tragic denial to a simple peasant of the fundamental right to happiness.
Munoo and his fellow coolies are exploited by the forces of industrialism,
capitalism, communalism, and colonialism. With its constantly shifting scene, its
variety of characters from ill classes of society and its wealth of eventful
incident, Coolie has an almost epic quality. However, in his crusading zeal,
Anand neglects Munoo's inner development altogether, and in the last part of the
narrative relies excessively on chance. Humanitarian compassion distorts action
and character even more disastrously in Two Leaves and a Bud, though the
novel has its better points. The locale here is a tea-plantation in Assam to which
Gangu, a poor Punjabi peasant, is lured by fabulous promises. Compelled to
work in unhygienic conditions and starved, he is shot dead by a British officer,
who tries to rape his daughter. Anand tries to be objective by showing how the
British attitude to the Indian can be both imperialistic as in the case of Reggie
Hunt or liberal as in that of Dr. de la Havre, but on the whole, the impression is
unavoidable that Gangu is presented as a veritable Indian Job in order that the
author’s thesis can be proved. The one saving grace of the novel is the
imaginative description of the plantation scene.

A luckier Punjabi peasant is the protagonist of the ambitious trilogy—The

Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1941) and The Sword and the Sickle
(1942). The first novel in the series

offers a realistic picture of life in a typical Punjabi village in early twentieth

century seen through the eyes of young LalSingh, who is an insider turned
outsider, as he is a rebel against all the village mores which he finally escapes by
running away. Across the Black Waters, which shows Lal Singh joining the
army and fighting in Flanders in the first World War, is perhaps the only major
war novel in Indian English literature, inviting comparison with All Quiet on
The Western Front and The Red Badge of Courage. It has the same open-eyed
honesty and deep compassion. The last volume of the trilogy however, comes as
a sad anti-climax. The Sword and the Sickle is an extremely confused book. It
shows LalSingh returning home from a German prison, hobnobbing with
Communists and ending up in prison again. In his picture of both Communism
and Gandhism Anand resorts to cheap irony (the Communists especially are
shown to be a crowd of clowns), thus depriving LalSingh’s quest of any possible
seriousness.

The Big Heart (1945), on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of Anand's better
efforts, though marred at the end by compulsive preaching. Ananta, the young
coppersmith, called ‘Big Heart’ owing to his generosity, aggressively champions
the machine and modernity in a traditional society and finally pays the price with
his life. The novel has perhaps a special niche in the heart of its creator, since it
presents an intimate picture of a segment of society to which Anand himself
belongs; and Ananta is perhaps the best realized of Anand’s heroes. As in
Untouchable, the entire action takes place on a single day and but for a similar,
gratuitous harangue in the end, the novel has a taut structure.

The Big Heart was Anand’s last novel before Independence. One would have
thought that Anand with his keen interest in contemporary social and political
problems should have found the immediate post-Independence scene an exciting
and reward* ing artistic challenge. But on his return to India for good in 1945,
Anand had suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of a personal tragedy. It
was perhaps this that made him turn inward and escape into the past rather than
confronting the immediate present. His first utterance after Independence was
Seven Summers (1951), an engaging fictional account of his childhood and the
first of a long projected series of autobiographical novels with Krishan Chander
as the protagonist. Another attempt to achieve a personal catharsis was The
Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953), in which the hero has a nervous
breakdown. This controversial novel, admired by a few of Anand’s critics but
attacked by many others, is a pathological study of a neurotic Maharaja. It is
clear that Anand does not know his prince and the prince’s milieu as intimately
as he knows his Punjabi peasant, and is relying on well-worn stereotypes. The
mad Maharaja’s excesses (of which the titillating title gives ample promise) are
as odious as the contrived plot with its inevitable tiger-hunt, juggler show, egg-
eating contest (and even discussions of Indian philosophy) is theatrical. Above
all, it is almost comic to see the champion of the down-trodden weeping over the
downfall of a Maharaja.

Fortunately, Anand returned to his peasant in The Old Woman and the Cow
(1960). The ‘cow’ is Gauri, a simple peasant girl forsaken by her husband and
actually sold to a rich merchant by her mother, whose logic is reminiscent of that
of Hardy’s peasants: ‘It was a choice between my Gauri and my cow.’ Gauri
escapes, becomes self-reliant and is transformed into a veritable tigress. This is a
neat reversal of the age-old Sita myth in the modern contest. Unfortunately, here
also Anand blots his artistic copy-book by resorting to direct statement through
his mouthpiece, Dr Mahindra, Gauri’s benefactor.

Anand’s next two novels are slight works, showing how he has never been able
to sustain his art at a consistently high level.The Road (1963), is a rehash of the
Untouchable theme, adding little that is new by way of thought or insight, and
TheDeath of a Hero (1964) a short novel on a Kashmir freedom fighter again
reveals how Auand resorts to mere conventionalities when he is cut off from his
native Punjab scene. In the ’seventies, Anand returned to the autobiographical
vein, which he first exploited inSeven Summers. Morning Face (1970; Sahitya
Akademi award, 1972) and Confession of a Lover (1976), like Seven
Summers,are parts of a long fictional autobiography reportedly planned, in seven
volumes. Morning Face covers the period of the hero’s school days and
adolescence, and the storv of the growth of Krishan Chander’s mind —
especially his sharpened political awareness—isevocatively told. An interesting
aspect of the novel is the number of characters and situations from Anand’s
fiction reappearing in it. Though it lacks the freshness of the much shorter Seven
Summers, Morning Face is an authentic document of the revelation of a mind
and its

milieu. In Confession of a Lover, Krishan Chander goes to college, has an

unsuccessful love affair with a young married Muslim girl, dabbles in poetry,
journalism and politics and at the end leaves for England. As one watches
Krishan Chander grow up, one feels that his sensitivity, amounting almost to
morbidity at times, and his uninhibited self-love—qualities rather engaging in
the child and the adolescent—are increasingly less so in the youth. The story of
Krishan Chander and Yasmin has its tender moments but seems to move
dangerously close to the world of romantic conventionalities, especially when
the hero indulges in not infrequent rhetoric.

The strength of Anand’s fiction lies in its vast range, its wealth of living
characters, its ruthless realism, its deeply felt indignation at social wrongs, and
its strong humanitarian compassion. His style, at its best, is redolent of the
Indian soil, as a result of his bold importation into English of words, phrases,
expletives, turns of expression and proverbs drawn from his native Punjabi and
Hindi. A tendency to slip into easy sentimentality and lose artistic control, a
weakness for preaching, and a frequent insensitiveness to the nuances of
expression, which often makes him write in a footloose, frenzied and even
slipshod manner, have made his work extremely uneven, though his total
fictional achievement, with all its limitations, remains impressive enough.

The art of Rashipuram Krishnaswamy Narayan (1906—) offers an interesting

contrast to that of Mulk Raj Anand. Narayan’s delicate blend of gentle irony and
sympathy, quiet realism and fantasy stands poles apart from Anand’s militant
humanism with its sledge-hammer blows and his robust earthiness. A Tamil who
has spent the major part of his life in the quiet city of Mysore, Narayan is the son
of a school master. Except for brief stints of working as a school master and a
newspaper correspondent, he has devoted himself exclusively to writing—a rare
phenomenon- in modern Indian literature. Narayan’s little dramas of middle
class life are enacted in Malgudi, an imaginary small town in South India which
comes to be felt as a living ambience in his fiction. His first novel, Swami and
Friends (1935), is a delightful account of a school boy, Swaminathan, whose
name, abridged as ‘Swami’ gives a characteristically Narayanesque, ironic
flavour to the title, raising expectations which the actual narrative neatly
demolishes. Swami’s story is that of the average school boy with its usual rounds
of pranks and punishments, but Narayan tells it with such good-humoured

banter and understanding of a ‘boy’s will’ that he recaptures all the freshness of
boyhood days. What one misses, however, is that sense of the pathos and pain of
growing, of passing time that one unmistakably gets in a much more complex
chronicle of childhood like the first part of L.P. Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda
trilogy. Narayan’s art is still content to skim on the surface

in The Bachelor of Arts (1937), the story of Chandrari, a sensitive youth caught
in a conflict between the western ideas of love and marriage instilled into him by
his education and the traditional social set up in which he lives. His frustration
drives him to become a sanyasi for a time, after which he returns home to find
that a traditional, arranged marriage is not, after all, an imposition. Narayan
makes us smile gently at Chandran’s adolescent gropings, but is careful to enlist
our sympathies for him. The novel, however, leaves us with the feeling that the
author has made no attempt to probe the real implications of the conflict.

The Dark Room (1938) is Narayan’s only attempt to write in a fictional register
totally unsuited to his talent-a wholly serious tale of silent suffering and abject
surrender. The victim is Savitri (the name recalls the archetypal constant wife of
Hindu legend) who, finding her husband infatuated with a working woman,
leaves him and the children only to realize that a traditional, middle class Hindu
wife is all but helpless, cut off from home. She pockets her pride and returns
defeated to her unrepentant husband. It is difficult to sympathize with any of the
three main characters here. Savitri is too spineless to become a tragic figure, her
husband is a cad and Shanta Bai, the ’other’ woman remains a shadowy figure.
The upshot is not a powerful drama of emotional crisis but a little storm in a
small domestic tea-cup, more than slightly cracked. The Dark Room is by no
stretch of the imagination an Indian version of The Doll's House. The English
Teacher (1946; issued in the U.S.A. as Grateful to Life and Death), Narayan’s
last novel before Independence, clearly demarcates the areas of his strength and
weakness, by neatly dividing itself into two halves of equal length. The first half
is a charming prose idyll centred round ‘The Angel in the House’, bringing out
both the poetry of the daily routine when youth and love preside over the little
middle class home of Krishnan, a young college lecturer, and the comic irony of
the petty problems of the daily business of living. At the end of part I, the young
wife, Susila dies. On the second half the only verdict possible is the one in
Pope’s well- known epigram, ‘On one who made long epitaphs’: ‘one half will
never be believed’. Krishnan establishes connection with the spirit of his dead
wife and resolves to devote the rest of his life to a children’s school. Narayan’s
imagination being certainly not of the type which can effortlessly make the
supernatural natural, this tame exercise in spiritualism is hardly convincing.

Narayan’s art reached its maturity after Independence, when he was finally able
to enlist his good-humoured irony as a firm ally of serious moral concern in
three novels: The Financial Expert (1952), The Guide (1958) and The Man-eater
of Malgudi(1962). Before he did this, however, he tried an unsuccessful
experiment in another direction in Mr. Sampath (1949). This is an extravaganza
dealing with the making of a mythological film. During the shooting of the
climactic scene, there are strange developments totally outside the official
scenario, when Ravi, the young artist, who has fallen in love with the actress
Shanti, tries to carry her off. The action is crowded with eccentrics and the entire
narrative has an obviously farcical colouring. This is somewhat of a strain on
Narayan’s art, which is more at home .in administering delicate ironic thrusts.

But this experiment with extravaganza was not altogether a waste. It becomes a
minor but useful motif in The Financial Expert. The rise and fall of Margayya
(‘the way-shower’, a name rich in irony) is a revealing study of the cash nexus in
modern life. Margayya, an obscure middleman, who ekes out a living by sitting
in front of a bank and helping villagers with their loans, is humiliated by the
Bank Secretary. Shaken by this humiliation like Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom, he fasts and worships Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth for
forty days, and his luck turns. Getting hold, of a pornographic book by Dr. Pal,
an eccentric sociologist, he prints it, and with the proceeds embarks on a money-
lending career which flourishes beyond his wildest dreams. The inevitable crash
then comes, ironically enough, through Dr. Pal himself. The end shows a
chastened but by no means broken Margayya preparing to resume his first
humble occupation. This ironic reversal brings home to him the age-old lesson
that prosperity and peace do not always go together. The element of fantasy—
represented by Dr. Pal, the unworldly scholar, the ‘old Man of Madras’, who
claims he is ‘only God’s agent’, and the episode of Lakshmi-worship—is made
firmly subservient to the central theme and thus kept well within safe artistic
limits.

The Guide (1958; Sahitya Akademi award, 1960) is easily Narayan’s finest
novel. Nowhere else is his irony sharper or more firmly wedded to the moral
imagination, nor has his technique been subtler. As in The Financial Expert, the
central theme is ironic reversal, but not only is the irony multiple here; it also
piles comic complication upon complication until finally the pyramid collapses,
crushing the hero to death. ‘Railway Raju’, a tourist guide, has an affair with
Rosie, the unhappy wife of an unwordly scholar and makes her a successful
professional dancer; but is jailed for forgery, trying to prevent a possible
reconciliation between her and her husband. Mistaken for a sadhu upon his
release, he is prompted both by necessity and vanity to play the part well,
resulting in many ironic developments, until finally the saint’s halo becomes a
deadly noose when he is compelled to die fasting, to bring rain to a drought-
stricken village. The ending is charged with a Hawthornian ambiguity. Raju’s
last words are: ‘it’s raining in the hills,’ but whether the fake sadhu’s genuine
ordeal has really brought rain or not is left vague. Raju's transformation from a
railway ‘guide’ into a half-reluctant and half-purposeful guru is worked out
through a neatly woven pattern of ironic complications, but the irony is not a
simple blend of the comic and the tragic. It raises many disturbing questions
about human motives and actions, compelling us to ponder problems such as
appearance and reality, the man and the mask, ends and means. Of all Narayan’s
novels The Guide teases us into thought to an,extent no other novel of his does.
Narayan’s fictional technique is also at its subtlest in The Guide. The narrative
alternates between the past and the present, ‘swinging backward and forward’ as
Rosie does when she dances, thus emphasizing how Raju’s present is inexorably
rooted in his past. The blend of the omniscient and the autobiographical methods
of narration endows the story with a double perspective. The novel, which opens
with Raju in the ruined village temple about to be reverentially accepted as a
sadhu ends in the same locality with his enforced death, thus giving the tale a
perfectly rounded, circular structure.

In The Man-eater of Malgudi (1962), Narayan’s moral concern is expressed

through a re-telling, in a modern context, of the ancient Hindu fable of
Bhasmasura, the Rakshasa (demon) who, granted by Siva the boon of reducing
to ashes anyone he touched on the head, was finally tricked by Vishnu (disguised
as a beautiful damsel) into touching himself to death. The modern Bhasmasura is
Vasu, the taxidermist, a selfish, godless bully who, as he waits to shoot the
temple elephant, accidentally kills himself when he slaps at a mosquito buzzing
near his forehead. To Vasu’s demon, his friend Nataraj, the timid printer and
ineffectual angel is an excellent foil. The significance of Vasu's just end is
underlined by Sastri, Nataraj’s assistant and an eminent representative of the
average man: ‘Every demon carries within him, unknown to himself, a tiny seed
of self- destruction, and goes up in thin air at the most unexpected movement.
Otherwise what b to happen to humanity?' Comedy is provided by the usual
group of eccentrics—this time a poet busy composing an epic on Krishna in
monosyllabic verse and a retired forest officer engaged in compiling an
Anthology of Golden Thoughts from world literature. The irony of the title,
which suggests a hunting yarn and presents a moral fable instead is plain.

None of the remaining novels of Narayan comes up to the level of his three
major works, for one reason or another. InWaiting For the Mahatma (1955), a
novel dealing with the Gandhian freedom struggle, Narayan, trying to do too
many things at once, only succeeds in telling a conventional love story ending in
the union of Sriram, a typical, weak-willed Narayan hero and Bharati, a
Congress volunteer and a determined young girl. If Narayan’s main aim here
was to depict the freedom struggle of 1942, his picture is neither representative
nor evocative. Sriram’s sudden conversion into a freedom fighter is
unconvincing, because he is so obviously interested in Bharati and not in Bharat-
mata (Mother India). Certain touches in episodes like Gandhiji’s visit to
Malgudi, the chaos after Gandhi’s arrest etc., raise hopes of a total ironic vision,
but this stance is not kept up consistently, and when the scene shifts from
Malgudi to Delhi, Narayan no longer appears to be on sure ground.

The same lack of a hard, central core mars The Vendor of Sweets (1967), which
continues the Gandhian motif. Jagan, the sweet-vendor, who is a Gandhian, finds
his only son, Mali lured away by the West. Mali returns from the U.S.A. with a
halfAmerican and half-Korean girl (to whom he is not married) and has plans for
devising a novel-writing machine, making the frustrated Jagan renounce the
world. Is Narayan’s aim here to portray the clash of generations or to deal with
East-West confrontation or to examine the efficacy of Gandhism in the modern
world? The action of the novel raises all these issues but fails to add up to a
coherent fictional statement.

The Painter of Signs (1976) followed after nine years of silence and added little
to Narayan’s reputation. Here again is a narrative of human relationship which
fails to attain that extra dimension of significance which Narayan’s major work
possesses The relationship tetween Raman, the young, unattached sign-painter
and 'Daisy’ of the Family Planning Centre goes through vicissitudes, finally
leaving Raman sans both his aunt (who, disapproving of the match, goes on a
pilgrimage) and would-be wife. Expectations of an artistic use of an ancient
Indian parallel as in The Man-eater of Malgudi are raised when Raman himself
mentions the King Santhanu-Ganga story as Daisy starts laying down conditions
on which she would marry him, but this is the last one hears of it. The Raman-
Daisy relationship, which recalls that between Sriram and Bharati in Waiting for
the Mahatma, is presented equally unsuccessfully. Daisy’s changing reactions
are not always adequately motivated and Raman’s self-declared rationalism
remains an unproved assertion. The novel makes us wonder whether the halcyon
days of The Guide and The Man-eater of Mulgudi are now over. The signs are
all there, in The Painter of Signs.

Narayan’s fiction is imbued with a strong ‘sense of place’. His setting, Malgudi,
develops from novel to novel but always possesses a genius locus which gives
reality to his men and women. Narayan is no poet and cannot give us what
Henry James called the ‘aroma of the meadows and lanes’ in Hardy, but he
certainly makes real to us the ‘ankle deep’ dust in Anderson Lane and the
raucous noises in the market. Like Arnold Bennett, Narayan relies more on keen
observation and steady accumulation of small details than on evocative
description. He has no great heroes and heroines —only local nobodies and local
eccentrics, and his style habitually wears a deliberately drab air so that the
thrusts of his insistent irony are felt all the more sharply. It is out of its depth
only when the author expects his words to take wing or catch fire. Narayan’s
fiction consistently creates a credible universe observed with an unerring but
uniformly tolerant sense of human incongruity; but gains in stature when, at his
best, he is able to hitch the waggon of his ironic action to the star of moral
imagination.

Raja Rao (1908—)** the youngest of the trio, hails from an ancient South Indian
Brahmin family, which counts among its ancestors Vidyaranya Swami, perhaps
the greatest teacher of the philosophy of non-dualism after Sankaracarya. Part of
Rao’s childhood was spent with his grandfather, who was spiritually inclined
and this fact becomes significant when one considers the concern with spiritual
values that characterizes this novelist’s work. Deeply influenced by sages like
Pandit Taranath of the Tungabhadra Ashram and Sri Atmanand Guru of
Trivandrum, Raja Rao’s passionate attachment to the Indian ethos has, curiously
enough, been actually strengthened by his long exile from India since 1929 when
he sailed for France to do research on the mysticism of the West. For the last
fifty years, except for periodic visits home, of long or short duration, he has been
abroad, though he moved from France to the U.S.A. in 1965.

Unlike Anand and Narayan, Raja Rao has not been a prolific novelist, having
written just four novels beginning withKanthapura (1938), which is perhaps the
finest evocation of the Gandhian age in Indian English fiction. It is the story of a
small South Indian village caught in the maelstrom of the freedom struggle of
the nineteen thirties and transformed so completely in the end that ‘there’s
neither man nor mosquito’ left in it. In this little village situated high on the
ghats up the Malabar coast, the most important event has traditionally been the
ploughing of the fields at the first rains. In 1930, the harvest reaped is the
Gandhian whirlwind. Raja Rao offers ho dreamland vision of the freedom
struggle. In fact, the initial reaction of Kanthapura to Gandhian thought is one of
bored apathy. But young Moorthy, the Gandhian, who knows that the master-
key to the Indian mind is religion, puts the new Gandhian wine into the age-old
bottle of traditional Harikatha (legendary narrative of God) and thus
indoctrinates the Kanthapurans. There is also no runaway victory for Gandhism
in the village, for the forces of orthodoxy and conservatism arestrong. The
struggle is even harder for the simple, illiterate village women who don’t
understand the why and the wherefore of it all, and only know that the Mahatma
is right in the tradition of the Hindu avatars. They have their moments of
temptation, cowardice and backsliding but still hold out to the bitter end, until
Kanthapura is a deserted village. Kanthapura is thus a brilliant attempt to probe
the depths to which the nationalistic urge penetrated, showing how, even in the
remote villages, the new upsurge fused completely with traditional religious
faith, thus rediscovering the Indian soul.

Like its sensibility, the form and style of Kanthapura also belong to the living
Indian tradition. In his Foreword, which has now become a classic, Raja Rao
wrote, ’We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only
as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method
of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as
distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.’
The narrative technique of the novel offers the required justification. The
narrator is an old grandmother, who tells the story in the garrulous, digressive
and breathless style of the Indian purana or the Harikatha, mixing freely
narration, description, reflection, religious discourse, folk-lore, etc. Like Anand,
Rao also boldly translates Indian words, phrases, expletives, and idioms—in this
case from his native Kannada—into English and uniformly brings a touch of a
poet to his style.

Kanthapura was Rao’s only novel before Independence. The

long silence that followed made many believe that the novelist was now an
‘extinct volcano’. And then came The Rope and the Serpant (1960; Sahitya
Akademi award, 1963), perhaps the greatest of Indian English novels. The book,
which took ten years in shaping itself, is a highly complex and many-sided
novel, being at once the tragic story of a marriage of minds which drift apart; the
spiritual autobiography of a learned, sensitive, and imaginative modern Indian
intellectual, as also a saga of his quest for self-knowledge and self-fulfilment; a
memo

rable presentation of the prime values of both the East and the West and a drama
enacting their mutual impact; a sustained piece of symbolism and a re-creation
of a valuable ancient Hindu myth; a fictional statement of the philosophy of
Sankara’s nondualism; and a conscious attempt both to create a truly Indian
novel with its roots firmly embedded in native tradition and to forge an Indian
English style which expresses its complex vision adequately and authentically.

The Serpent and the Rope, which has a strong autobiographic colouring, is the
story of Ramaswamy, a young Hindu, who goes to France to do research in
history, meets and marries Madeleine, a lecturer in history, but they soon drift
apart gradually as Ramaswamy comes to realize the gulf between the Indian and
Western conceptions of love, marriage and family— particularly after he meets
Savithri, a Cambridge-educated and militantly modern girl, who is yet Indian to
the core. Madeleine finally withdraws not only from Ramaswamy but also from
the world; and he realizes that his love for Savithri, far from being of the kind
that would find fulfilment in physical union, is actually an instrument of
achieving the higher Love, the ultimate union of the soul with God. The novel
ends with Ramaswamy setting out to go to his Guru, who alone can destroy his
ego and make him fit for the great consummation.

The themes of true love and marriage thus lead to the larger theme of the quest
for self-knowledge suggested in the title, ‘The Serpent and the Rope’. The
analogy, taken from Sankara- carya, illustrates the doctrine that just as the rope
is often wrongly taken to be the serpent, the limited self is often regarded as the
individual soul, which is only an aspect of God. One realizes that the 'serpent’ is
really only a rope, when one who knows points this out; similarly, upon being
initiated by the Guru, one realizes that Jiva (the individual soul) is one with Siva.
The Serpent and the Rope is a truly philosophical novel in that in it the
philosophy is not in the story—the philosophy is the story.

The novel also contrasts oriental and occidental worldviews in respect of basic
issues such as sex and marriage, society, religion, learning, and death. It is
possible to argue that Ramaswamy looks at India through rose-tinted spectacles
(a typical expatriate reaction) but glues his eyes to a microscope while
examining the limitations of western culture. But the fact remains that few
Indian English novels handle this theme on so vast a scale and with such
authenticity of experience as The Serpent and the Rope does.

The Serpent and the Rope is rich in an array of meaningful symbols. Apart from
the symbolism of the title, the two epigraphs from Sri Atmananda Guru (Rao’s
own guru): 'Waves are nothing but water; so is the sea’ and Paul Valery’s line,
La mer, la mer, toujours recommenc'ee both use the ocean as a symbol, though
in different ways. For Atmananda Guru (as for Rao) the identity of the wave and
the sea is that between the jiva and Siva; but Valdry, who opts for the human
world, asks the waves to break the huge white roof of the ocean. Similarly, the
name ‘Savithri’ is obviously symbolic, indicating both the sun and that paragon
of wifely devotion, the Savitri of ancient Hindu legend, who rescued her
husband Satyavan from death. Savithri’s role in the novel is the same—to bring
enlightenment to Ramaswamy and save him from dying into a purely worldly
life. Savithri further represents the eternal Feminine Principle also symbolized in
the novel by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in London, which forms a
significant episode.

The form of The Serpent and the Rope shows a successful blend of Indian and
western modes. The inspiration for the novel partly came from Rilke’s The
Notebooks of Matte Laurids Brigge,17 and another western parallel is the novel
of spiritual quest—Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, for instance. The
autobiographical method of narration is a characteristically modern western
fictional technique. Typical Indian elements are the essentially ‘puranic’
structure of the novel, blending story, philosophy and religion; the interspersing
of the narrative with verses as in the Sanskrit form, campu, and pithy dialogue
on philosophical questions as in the Upanishads. The novel also tries to graft
some features of the rhythms of Sanskrit speech on English; and the style,
frequently sonorous, repetitive and swift has an unmistakably Indian colouring
which is further deepened by the use, as in Kanthapura, of bold importations
from Indian speech into English.

The Serpent and the Rope is a diffuse and garrulous book, and Ramaswamy’s
parade of learning, his intellectual arrogance and his bouts of self-pity can be
irritating, while Rao’s tremendous linguistic resource can occasionally turn into
sheer verbal jugglery, which brings diminishing returns with every new
metaphysical hair meticulously split as in ‘Meaning is meaningful to meaning’.
But with all its limitations, The Serpent and the Rope is a dazzling performance
by any fictional standard. Its philosophical profundity and symbolic richness, its
lyrical beauty and descriptive power, and its daring experimentation with form
and style make it a major achievement. Few Indian English novels have
expressed the Indian sensibility with as much authenticity and power as The
Serpent and the Rope has.

The Cat and Shakespeare (1965; an earlier version called The Cathad appeared
in 1959) is another attempt at philosophical fiction, though in a new direction
altogether viz., metaphysical comedy. The author himself has called it ‘a book of
prayer’, but it is a strange prayer to a strange god, a prayer in which the solemn
chants of devotion are mingled with loud guffaws of laughter. Reverence and
irreverence, fantasy and reality, mysticism and Mammonism, the past with its
age-old philosophy and the present of the global war—are all mixed together in
this brief, teasing fable.

On the simple narrative level the novel is an uproariously funny story (of deep
philosophical import, though) of a cat and two clerks—one, Ramakrishna Pal,
the narrator, is an innocuous little man, who loves the beautiful Shanta and
dreams of building a big house; the other, his neighbour Govindan Nair, is a
genial soul and a man built on a large scale, whose philosophy of life is that one
should surrender oneself completely to the supreme energizing principle in the
universe which he symbolically calls ‘Mother Cat'. The two clerks—especially
Nair— undergo several surrealistic adventures including cat-worship in the
corrupt Rationing Office where Nair works, the sudden death by heart-failure of
his boss when the cat sits on the unfortunate man’s head and the trial of the cat
in a court of law. At the end, Nair is his old hatppy self, in spite of all that has
happened (including the death of his son), while Ramakrishna Pal fulfils his
ambition of building his house; and in the symbolic finale, he follows the cat up
the stairs and is vouchsafed a mystic experience. We leave him listening to ‘the
music of marriage’, i.e. in a state of illumination.

That this comic extravaganza has a sound philosophical foundation is indicated

by the epigraph drawn once again from Atmananda Guru: ‘There is the .scent
and the beauty (form) of a flower. But who knows what a flower really is?’ This
points straight to the central theme of the book—the affirmation of the Ultimate
Reality behind all appearance. Nair’s symbol of the cat is drawn from
Ramanujacarya’s (11th century) philosophy of Modified Non-dualism,
according to which Man can save himself not through knowledge, but through
self-surrender. After Ramanuja’s death, this doctrine came to be interpreted in
two different ways called the ‘monkey-theory’ (markata- nyaya) and the ‘cat-
hold theory’ (marjara-nyaya). According to the first, the human spirit should
actively strive to seek union with God, like the young monkey clinging
desperately to its mother; the second school holds that Man’s surrender is so
total as to involve complete dependence on the Divine as in the case of the
young kitten lifted by the scruff of the neck by the mother-cat. Both Paland Nair
are examples of the cat-hold theory in operation and Nair’s career illustrates that
extreme aspect of the theory which holds that the pardoning God loves the sinner
even more than He does the pure. The Mother-cat is also the Feminine principle,
symbolized in Shanta and her
daughter Usha too.

The addition of Shakespeare to the title was an afterthought (the first version
was called simply The Cat) but several significant suggestions such as 'the
Mousetrap'in Hamlet, Nair's parody of the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy and his
style which is described as a mixture of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield and
Shakespeare’ and the general Shakespeare enigma of which Arnold’s ‘Others
abide the question: Thou art free’ is an effective statement link up the cat and the
Bard. There are also other symbols such as Pai’s white house with its three
stories indicating three states of being; the three colours of the Ration Card
suggestive of the three gunas; the sea, again representing the Infinite Reality; the
wall over which Nairand the cat are always jumping, representing the barrier of
mere Appearance etc. The form of the novel is again composite, a blend of the
beast fable, the rogue story and the parable, and the dialogue frequently has an
IJpanishadic flavour.

In spite of its rich philosophical content and its delightful comedy, The Cat and
Shakespeare is not the assured success thatThe Serpent and the Rope is. The
book moves at once on different levels and the gap is sometimes so wide as to
defy any but the specialist reader. Furthermore, the earlier novel was solidly
grounded in a most human and meaningful Hindu myth— The Savitri legend;
The Cat and Shakespeare rests only on a symbol drawn from the animal world
and used on an abstract philosophical level.

Comrade Kirillov (1976), Raja Rao’s most recent novel, has a curious publishing
history. Originally written in English— (perhaps a rather early work), it was first
published in French in 1965, and the English version represents the revised text.
A long short story rather than a novel, the book reads like an extended character-
sketch. Kirillov is actually Padmanabha Iyer, an Indian intellectual, his Russian
appellation being after the dedicated fanatic by that name in Dostoevsky’s
Possessed. Kirillov’s self-description is: ‘Anonymous my name, logic my
religion; Communism my motherland.’ Set in the nineteen thirties and forties in
London, the novel mainly comprises the garrulous Kirillov’s opinions on
Communism, the British, the

War, the Indian freedom struggle etc.,— all viewed through expectedly bright
red spectacles. He marries Irene—a Czech girl, who shares his convictions, and
on her death leaves for Moscow, landing in Peking when the novel ends. The
narrator, for the most part, is ‘R’, who is later identified with Raja Rao himself
(there is a delightful piece of self-debunking on p. 118). Kirillov is viewed with
good-humoured irony as a professed Communist who is yet very much an Indian
at heart. Part of the narration is by excerpts from Irene’s diary but they don’t
seem to add much by way of a different perspective. There are suggestions of the
East-West theme of The Serpent and the Rope in the picture of the Kirillov-Irene
relationship, and the persistent irony in the earlier part recalls the comic vein in
The Cat and Shakespeare, but it is clear that in Comrade Kirillov Rao has very
little new to say. Kirillov hardly emerges as a living figure, because the putative
complexity of his character is only reported but not realized in effective fictional
terms through meaningful incident or symbolic presentation.

Raja Rao’s fiction obviously lacks the social dimension of his two major
contemporaries. Not for him the burning humanitarian zeal of Anand, nor
Narayan’s sure grasp of the living minutiae of the daily business of living. Their
easy fecundity has also never been his. But in no two novels of his does Rao
strike the same fictional chord. The fervent nationalism of Kanthapura offsets
the cool irony of Comrade Kirillov; and the serious philosophical speculation in
The Serpent and the Rope is tonally far different from the heady mixture of farce
and philosophy in The Cat and Shakespeare. Within his brief corpus of writing
Raja Rao has crammed things which could have been, with a little clever
housewifery, neatly spread out into a dozen novels and more. But even with his
small output, his oosition as perhaps the most ’Indian’ of Indian English
novelists, as probably the finest painter of the East-West confrontation, as
symbolist, stylist and philosophical novelist, and as an original voice in modern
fiction, undoubtedly remains secure.

Apart from the work of Anand, Narayan and Rao quite a considerable amout of
fiction was produced during the period, much of it in a minor vein. An
interesting phenomenon is the number of Muslim novelists, most of whom wrote
evocatively about life in Muslim households. Twilight in Delhi (1940) by
Ahmed Ali (who became a Pakistani national after Partition) aims, according to
the author, at depicting ‘a phase in our national life and the decay of a whole
culture, a particular mode of thought and living, now dead and gone already
right before our eyes.’ Ahmed Ali’s picture of the middle class Muslim family of
Mir Nihal and its relationship with other Muslim families in early twentieth
century Delhi is indeed drawn with painstaking attention to detail; but it is a
moot point whether ‘the decay of a whole culture’ has adequately been depicted.
While subjecting the life of the Mir Nihal family to microscopic scrutiny, the
author has not related it to the larger forces in the composite Hindu-Muslim
world outside meaningfully enough. The rising tempo of the nationalistic
upsurge is mentioned, but is not woven firmly enough into the pattern of the
action, which remains severely limited to the domestic plane. Nor does Mir
Nihal emerge as a major figure whose death, at the end, would signify the
passing away of a whole culture. Ali’s Ocean of Night (1964) is another
nostalgic study of Muslim society, depicting this time the decadent aristocracy of
Lucknow between the Wars. The plot centres round the romantic motif of a
courtesan flouting her professional code to seek true love, only to find that she is
a prisoner of the system. Ali has captured the spirit of leisurely Lucknow life
admirably in the novel Iqbalunnisa Hussain’s Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an
Indian Muslim Household (1944) offers an equally intimate picture of a
traditional Muslim mercantile household seen through sensitive feminine eyes
and naturally all the richer in minutiae for it. In Humayun Kabir’s Men and
Rivers (1945), the East Bengal (now Bangla Desh) riverside scene affected by
the changing moods of the river Padma and their impact on the lives of the
fisher- folk are depicted with all the authenticity of an insider. But his plot
creaks with too many romantic joints—a love-triangle making bosom friends
sworn enemies; lovers suddenly discovering that they are children of the same
mother, etc.

Two other Muslim novelists have chosen their characters from both Muslim and
Hindu circles. In Aamir Ali’s Conflict (1947), the entire action concerns a Hindu
family, showing how Shankar, a village boy, comes to Bombay for higher
education and gets caught in the agitation of 1942. Unfortunately, Ali’s picture
of rustic life, his hero’s adjustment to urban surrounds ings and his initiation into
the freedom struggle remains largely superficial. His two later novels Via
Genera (1967) and Assignment in Kashmir(1973) move on the international
plane and are products of his experience of working as a diplomat. K.A. Abbas’s
numerous novels include popular film-scripts also. Among his less insubstantial
books, Tomorrow is ours: A Novel of the India of Today(1943) espouses several
causes, including nationalism, Leftism and denunciation of fascism and
untouchability. The protagonist Parvati devotes her dancing talents to the Indian
People’s Theatre and her doctor-husband goes off to China to tend the war-
wounded. The novelist, too busy maintaining his Leftist stance, allows the action
to be cluttered up with conventional twists and turns. Inquilab: A Novel of the
Indian Revolution (1955) is a more ambitious work, offering a panorama of the
Indian political scene during the nineteen twenties and thirties. The plethora of
characters and incidents allows little more than reportage, the realism of which is
severely jolted by the unnecessarily romantic ending, where the protagonist
Anwar is suddely discovered to be the illegitimate soh of a Hindu merchant.

Among the remaining novelists, special mention must be made of Dhan Gopal
Mukherji (1890-1936). His novels of jungle and rustic life which won great
popularity in the West, going through several editions, include Kari, the
Elephant (1922), Hari, the Jungle Lad (1924), Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
(1927), The Chief of the Herd (1929) and Ghond the Hunter (1929). While
Mukherji’s jungle lore is authentic and his knowledge of the animal world in
special is considerable, many of these novels appear to have been written with an
eye on the foreign reader to whose vision of exotic India they seem primarily to
cater. For instance,Ghond the Hunter begins as an authentic study of a village on
the jungle border but soon becomes a travel book, the village boy Ghond being
dispatched to Kashmir, Agra and Delhi so that the author may get a

chance to describe these places. (One must however concede that there is an
excellent description of the Tajmahal in the novel.) The poor hero is even made
to pass a night in a Ladakh village, ignoring the advice of its panicky residents,
who have abandoned their homes, so that the landslide which obligingly occurs
during the night could be described at first hand. Mukherji’s autobiographical
novel. My Brother’s Face (1926) is a far more memorable book. Here, the
narrator—a thinly veiled portrait of the author himself—returns to India after
twelve years spent in the West and notices the altered face of his native land
where he finds ‘the best of seventeenth century at war with the best of the
twentieth.*

Other novels of the period include C.S. Rau’s Hie Confessions of a Bogus
Patriot (1923). J. Chinnadurai’s Sugirtha (1929); Ram Narain’s Tigress of the
Harem (1930); H. Kaveribai’s Meenakshi’s Memoirs—A Novel of Christian
Life in South India (1937) ; V.V. Chintamani’s Vedantam or the Clash of
Traditions (1938) ; Shankar Ram’s The Love of Dust (1938); D.F. Karaka’s Just
Flesh(1941—perhaps the only novel by an Indian set wholly in the West and
containing only British characters); There Lay the City(1942—a love story set in
Bombay during World War II), and We Never Die (1944); C.N. Zutshi’s
Motherland (1944); Purushottamdas Tricumdas’s Living Mask (1947) and
N.S.Phadke's own translations from his Marathi originals— Leaves in the
August Wind (1947) and The Whirlwind (1956)— both set against the
background of the Ouit India Movement of 1942.
The Short Story
Like the novel, the Indian English short story too came into

its own during the Gandhian age. The most notable contribution here is by the
leading novelists, though there are also

writers who devoted themselves exclusively to this form. T.L.

Natesan, who wrote under the pen-name' Shankar Ram, is an early

example. His stories in The Children of Kaveri (1926) and

Creatures All (1933)—a selection from both the books appeared

under the title The Ways of Man (1968)—deal mostly with

rustic life in Tamil Nadu. Most of the stories are artless, and some sentimental
like ‘Blood is thicker than water/ which presents a motherless boy persecuted by
his step-mother. Many others rest upon shaky conventional motifs like an
estrangement between two near and dear ones, finally ending in reconciliation
(e.g ‘When one wound can heal another’); and some animal stories like ‘The
Rajah’s Last Hunt’ are almost naive. Shankar Ram’s heavy-handed didacticism
is writ large in crude titles such as ‘When punishment is a Boon,’ and in most
tales incident is far more important than character. But Shankar Ram-recaptures
the village scene evocatively and his literal translation of rustic nicknames like
‘Barrel-nose Grandpa’ and ‘spider-leg’ anticipates Raja Rao’s effective use of
this device

in Kanthapura.

Like Shankar Ram, almost all the notable short story writers

of the period (with the exception of Mulk Raj Anand) are

from South India. A.S.P. Ayyar, the novelist and playwright,

published three collections of stories: Indian After-Dinner Stories (1927), Sense

in Sex and Other Stories (1929) and The Finger of
Destiny and Other Stories (1932), besides retelling ancjent Indian

legends in books like Tales of Ind (1944) and Famous Tales of India

(1954). As in his plays, Ayyar’s constant theme in his stories is

social reform, and especially the plight of woman in traditional

Hindu society, which a character de

scribes as a ‘woman-eating monster’. His women include young

widows, who successfully re-marry in the teeth of opposition;

young girls married by their parents to old men for money;

abandoned or persecuted wives; victims of the dowry system

or of the absence of birth control, etc. His titles, like Shankar

Ram’s, are often stridently didactic: e.g. ‘Right to Happiness’

and ‘The Ways of Providence’. Ayyar’s characters are mostly

drawn in monochrome and both in conception and execution

his stories are little more than anecdotage.

Many of S.K. Chettur’s stories in Muffled Drums and Other

Stories (1917), The Cobras of Dhermashevi and Other Stories

(1937), The Spell of Aphrodite and Other Stories (1957) and

Mango Seed and Other Stories (1974) seem to be based on

material collected during his official tours as a member of the

Indian Civil Service. Village feuds, murders and local /egends about serpents,
ghosts and omens are his staple themes, and he seems to have a special
fascination for fantasy and the supernatural as in ‘The Spell of Aphrodite’ in
which Venus herself comes out of the ocean to lure an imaginative youth to his
death. Chettur, however, hardly possesses the kind of imagination which can
successfully accomplish ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’ in bis readers. But he
is a good raconteur and his narrative technique is far more sophisticated—
especially in bis later work—than that of Shankar Ram and Ayyar. He uses a
variety of narrative modes including the autobiographical method, the device of
the observer-narrator, and the epistolary method. His brother, G.K. Chettur,
produced a solitary collection, The Ghost City and Other Stories (1932)—an
interesting exercise in anecdotage distinctly inferior in quality to the verse of this
author.

Two other writers who have a single collection each to their credit are the
novelists, K.S. Venkataramani and K. Nagarajan. In his preface to Jatadharan
(1937), Venkataramani characterises his work as 'sketches rather than short
stories’ and confesses, ‘Almost unconsciously I find I develop a didactic tail
which my compassion for all life refuses to clip.’ Many of his heroes are
products of the Gandhian ferment, like Jatadharan in the story by that title, who
gives up his job to become a teacher in a village; and in ‘Illumination’ a briefless
but ambi

tious lawyer is consoled by his wife who preaches to him the Gita doctrine of
working without desiring the fruit of action. Venkataramani’s dialogue is often
over-ornate as in his novels, but he sometimes makes use of apt Indian analogy
as in ‘In those spacious days, the salt and Abkari departments went together like
sisters on a festive occasion.’ Of the dozen tales in Nagarajan’s Cold Rice
(1943), some obvidUsly draw upon the author’s experiences as a Government
pleader and read like court cases dressed up for narration, while others are
anecdotes. His art is seen to better advantage in the roomy form of the

novel.

The most productive of Indian English short story writers,

Manjeri Isvaran, the poet, has not yet received the recognition

due to him, since most of his books are now out of print. He is the author of The
Naked Shingles (1941), Siva Ratri (1943), Angry Dust (1944), Rickshawallah
(1946), Fancy Tales (1947), No Anklet bells for her (1949), Immersion (1951),
Painted Tigers (1956) and A Madras Admiral (1959). Isvaran’s keen interest in
the form is revealed in his attempt to discuss the theory of the short story in
some of his prefaces. In the preface to A Madras Admiral, he says, ‘A Short
Story can be a fable or a parable, real or fantasy, a true presentation or a parody,
sentimental or satirical; serious in intent or a light-hearted diversion; it can be
any of these, but to be memorable it must catch the eternal in

the casual, invest a moment with the immensity of time.’ Not all Isvaran’s
stories successfully ‘catch the eternal in

the cashal’; some of them are pure anecdotes and some like

‘That Moan’ and ‘War Memorial’ are unabashed tear-jerkers.

There are, at the same time, many stories which present illuminating glimpses
into human psychology and these stories are

remarkable for the variety of character and situation they present.. In ‘No anklet
bells for her’, a poor, ragged girl observes

her own reflection in the polished surface of a car parked on

the road and instinctively starts dancing only to be recalled to

harsh reality by the scolding of her mother. ’Sympathy’ shows

the middle-aged mother of a young widowed girl herself assuming voluntary

widowhood, though her puzzled and angry

husband is very much alive. ‘Consummation’ and ‘Revelation’ are sensitive

studies in the minds of a youthful couple on

their wedding night; ‘Passage Money’ exhibits the embarrassing plight of a

father, who has failed to notice that his daughter has attained womanhood; and in
’Angry Oust’, a retired

Muslim soldier re-employed as a peon to a European officer

suddenly dreams for a moment that he is the Great Mughal

himself, as he dozes outside his master's door.

Isvaran is also far more successful than some of his contemporaries in his
treatment of fantasy and the supernatural. In

‘Dance of Shiva’, he makes a sceptical Englishman see the

great god’s dance of destruction in a dream and his language is

certainly adequate for the challenge here. ’Painted Tigers’

shows a Muslim youth, Karim, made up as a Muharram tiger,

tearing at the neck of his rival, Umar. The old legend that Umar’s ancestor was
born with a tiger-paw mark on his shoulder and the fact that Karim is a lover of
Umar’s wife together make for an excellent blend of fantasy and psychology. In
‘Immersion’, a long short story, the ghost motif is harnessed to both pathos and
irony. The ghost of a young wife raped by a cartman while the couple is on a
pilgrimage has its tevenge, when it later suddenly confronts the cartman, who is
crushed to death underneath the over-turned cart. Ironically enough, the

husband does not come to know the truth at all.

Isvaran, like S. K. Chettur, employs a variety of narrative

strategies, including the observer’s point of view and the use of

journals and letters. His besetting sin is the irritatingly leisurely

mode of narration he often indulges in, and his fatal habit of

prolonging the story even after the point has been made. A

flowery style which aids and abets his innate sentimentality is

another of his liabilities. But his finest studies in human psychology are
generally powerful enough to rise above most of

his limitations.

Apart from Isvaran, the most signal contribution to the

short story of this period came from the three major novelists—
Anand, Narayan and Raja Rao. Copious in output like Isvaran,

Mulk Raj Anand has brought out seven collections of short stories so far. The
Lost Child and Other Stories (1934); The Barber's

Trade Union and Other Stories (1944); The Tractor and the Corn

Goddess and Other Stories (1947); Reflections on the Golden Bed

and Other Stories (1953); The Power of Darkness and Other

Stories (1959); Lajwanti and Other Stories (1966); and Between

Tears and Laughter (1973). Anand has also retold traditional

Indian tales in his Indian Fairy Tales (1946) and More Indian

Fairy Tales (1961). A representative selection is Selected Short

Stories of Mulk Raj Anand edited by M. K. Naik (New Delhi,

1977); The Selected Stories (Moscow, 1955) is now out of print.

Anand’s aims and methods are explained at length in his prefaces.

In the preface to Indian Fairy Tales, he observes: ‘Although Ihave

taken in much new psychology into my writing

of the short story, I have always tried to approximate to the

technique of the folk tale and the influence of these fairy stories

has always been very deep on my short fiction.’ In his preface to Selected
Stories, he adds, 'While accepting the form of the folk tale, specially in its
fabulous character, I took in the individual and group psychology of the
European conte and tried to

synthesize the two styles.’

Anand’s short stories are wide-ranging in mood and tone.

First, there are stories of ‘lyric awareness’ (to use his own

phrase) like ‘The Lost Child’ a parable in which the traumatic

experience of a child separated from its parents in a country

fair symbolizes a universal human plight; and ‘Birth’ which

presents a young, simple, peasant woman in an advanced state

of pregnancy. She feels assured that the goddess Kali is by her

side as she finds the birth-pangs starting, when she is on her.

way to work, alone and nervous. In contrast to these imaginative tales, there are
starkly realistic studies of men and women

crushed by overwhelming forces. Among these are ‘Lajwanti’,

the story of a helpless rustic girl persecuted by her in-laws; and

‘Old Bapu’ and The Cobbler and the Machine’ —sketches of

two unfortunate outcastes. Another prominent group is that of

stories of strong social awareness revealing Anand’s acute understanding of the

complex social forces at work in modern India.

‘The Power of Darkness’ and ‘The Tractor and the Corn

Goddess’ demonstrate the inevitable clash between tradition

and modernity in our country today; and feudalism and capitalism are pilloried
in ‘A. Kashmir Idyll’ and ‘The Price of

Bananas’ respectively Stories such as ‘A Pair of Mustachios’,

‘The Barber’s Trade Union* and ‘The Liar’ provide pure fun

seasoned with farce, while.subtle studies in psychology like

‘The Tamarind Tree’ and ‘The Thief’ strike a different note

altogether.

The range and variety of Anand’s short stories are evinced

not only in mood, tone and spirit but also in locale and characters, form and
style. While both the village and the city get

almost equal representation, the men, women and children that

move through these narratives come from different strata of

society. The forms Anand draws upon are the fable, the parable,

the folk-tale, the bardic narrative and sometimes even the well- made story; and
his style can be in turn lyrical and satirical,

light-hearted and indignant. As in his novels, he makes an almost aggressive use

of a great variety of Indianisms. His chief weaknesses are an occasional failure
of sensibility which can make him lachrymose and crude and a tendency to write
in a verbose—and sometimes even slipshod—manner. In his finest stories like
‘The Lost Child’, however, there is an admirable

control of both the material and the expression

R.K. Narayan’s career as a short story writer began almost

a decade after Anand’s, with Cyclone and Other Stories (1943),

Dodu and Other Stories (1943) and Malgudi Days (1943). His

subsequent collections are An Astrologer's Day and Other Stories (1947),

Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956), and A Horse

and Two Goats (1970). Gods, Demonsand Others (1964) is a

retelling of well-known ancient Hindu legends. Narayan’s most

chracteristic note in his short stories is a gentle irony. Ironic

reversal is sometimes made to throw light on human psychology,

as in ‘The Doctor’s Word’, in which, a physician, noted for

his ruthless truthfulness, tells a lie to save his best friend, who

is on his death-bed; in ‘Missing Mail’, a thoughtful postman

withholds a letter bearing the news of a relation’s death, so

that the marriage in the family may proceed without a hitch;

and ‘A Horse and Two Goats’ is a first class comedy of international

misunderstanding. An unlettered Indian goatherd

thinks that the American visitor to his village wishes to buy his

two goats, whereas the tourist is actually bargaining for the big

clay horse in the village of which he wrongly thinks the goatherd

is the owner. Here is a competition in single-minded simplicity

on two different cultural planes. In some other stories, the irony

arises out of comic complications creating predominantly humour

of situation. ‘Engine Trouble’ explains the strange plight of a

man who wins a road engine in a lottery—a prize which proves

to be a white elephant; finally nothing less than an earthquake

solves his problem, in ‘The Magic Beard’, a beard (which proves

lucky) makes a man a prosperous beggar-organizer, but disaster

strikes when he shaves it off, without anticipating the consequences. Narayan's

attempts at tragic irony, as in ‘Isvaran’

(a college student who has failed repeatedly passes at last in

second class and goes mad at this sudden shock of pleasant surprise) are not
equally successful, nor are his exercises in the supernatural like ‘Level Crossing’
and ‘Accident’ even adequate. And the humour in some of the animal stortes like
‘The Flavour of Coconut’ is rather heavy-handed. A few stories are purely
character-sketches and they reveal Narayan’s keen eye for eccentricity. ‘Uncle’,
‘Annamalai’ and 'Breath of Lucifer’

are excellent examples.

Narayan’s stories are uniformly compact and are told in his

usual seemingly artless style. He sometimes uses the ‘Talkative

Man’ as narrator in the manner of Wodehouse and except in

‘Uncle’s Letters* where the epistolary mode is employed, he

does not attempt any radical experiments in narration. The

thematic interconnections between some of Narayan’s stories

and his novels are interesting ‘The Regal’, ‘A Hero’ and

‘Father’s Help’ are stories of boyhood exploits which could

very well have fitted into Swami and Friends; ‘The White

Flower* employs the horoscope motif much in the same way

The Bachelor of Arts does; the situation in ‘The Seventh House’

has close affinities with The English Teacher and ‘Four Rupees’

repeats The Guide theme on a different level and with a happy

ending. Though Narayan's stories are always readable, they are

perhaps not as significant an achievement as his major novels.

What one misses, even in the best of them, is that transformation of irony from a
simple stance into a meaningful vision of
life which is unmistakably effected in The Guide and The Maneater of Malgudi.

True to his characteristic lack of fecundity. Raja Rao has

published only a dozen stories which are collected in The Cow

of the Barricades and Other Stories (1947) and The Policeman

and the Rose (1978), which is actually only a revised version

of the earlier collection, containing all but two of its stories and

adding three more. Nevertheless, these dozen stories exhibit

considerable thematic and formal variety.

‘The True Story of Kanakapala, Protector of Gold’ is a

retelling of an ancient legend about a snake-motif handled by

many Indian English writers; but Raja Rao succeeds best because

he rightly tells the traditional tale in the traditional manner. 'A Client' is a slight
anecdote about a youth caught by a

raarriige broker and the picture of the village bania in ‘The Little Gram Shop’ is
realistic, but hardly rises above the typical. It is not in these stories that we see
the real Raja Rao, as in the remaining three groups of stories. The first is that of
the ‘Gandhian Stories’, ‘The Cow of the Barricades’, ‘Nar- siga’ and ‘In
Khandesh’. Gauri, the temple cow in the, first of these stories dies of a
policeman’s bullet during the freedom riots and thus saves the lives of many in
the village. ‘Narsiga’ is an evocative picture of how the national consciousness
generated by the freedom struggle impinges on the mind of a small, illiterate,
rustic orphan, though in that process ancient myth and legend get inseparably
mixed with Gandhi’s life and character, as Narsiga imagines the great man
‘going in the air’ like Rama, ‘in a flower-chariot drawn by sixteen steeds’. ‘In
Khandesh’ recaptures the commotion caused by the Viceroy’s special train as it
passes by a village. Of the three studies of women, ‘Javni’ and ‘Akkayya’ are
memorable presentations of the traditional Hindu widow and her bleak life.
Though Javni belongs to a low class and Akkayya is a Brahmin, they both share
the inexorable futility of tradition- bound Indian widowhood in the same
measure. The immediacy of both these studies is hardly present in the same
degree in a later story, ‘Nimka’, a rather colourless portrait of a Russian

emigre in Paris.

The latest and perhaps the most characteristic of Rao's

stories are the two metaphysical narratives: ‘India: A Fable’

and.‘The Policeman and the Rose’—stories which obviously

belong to the period of The Serpent and the Rope and The Cat

and Shakespeare. The theme of ‘India: A Fable’ is indicated by

the epigraph: ‘Non-duality alone is auspicious.’ Here the

encounter of the narrator (who is identified with the author)

with a small French boy in Luxembourg park in Paris is full

of symbolic overtones. The boy who dreams of the Arabian

desert with its oases and camels (romantic illusion as a means

of escape from the waste land of the present) is told by the

narrator about the India of the forests and the Ganges (the

Reality) with its elephants and goddesses. The theme of the

Feminine Principle as a guide to the Ultimate Realization is

stressed in the repeated references to Queen Anne of Austria, the boy’s mother
and nurses and marriage. The fact that the West is represented by a small boy
and East by a thoughtful adult is perhaps suggestive of the author’s evaluation of
the relative spiritual development of the two societies. The symbols in ‘The
Policeman and the Rose’ are even more intricate. The central theme is obviously
the quest for self-realization and the symbols are drawn from Non-dualism. The
‘policeman’ who arrests every man at birth is the ahamkara (ego-sense) of the
limited individual self and the ‘red rose’ is the Rajo-guna, the passions of the
mind. Man can ultimately shake off. the ‘policeman’ only when he surrenders
the red rose to the Lotus of Truth, which the narrator, like the hero of The
Serpent and the Rope locates at the feet of his guru in Travancore. The
reverberating symbolism in both these stories makes them brief but memorable
metaphysical documents in fictional form with

out a parallel in the field of the Indian English short story. Of ft.A. Abbas’s four
short story collections, the first appeared in

the year of Indian Independence: Rice and other Stories (1947), the

others being Cages of Freedom and other Stories( 1952),

One Thousand Nights on a Bed of Stones and Other Stories

(1957) and The Black Sun and Other Stories (1963). Most of

these stories are strongly coloured by Abbas’s militant Leftism,

and not a few carry the tell-tale marks of his journalistic and

film-world experience, both in conception and technique. In only

a few stories like ‘Sparrows’ and ‘Sardarji’ is Abbas able to

rise above sheer leftist propaganda or slick film-script writing,

making the discerning reader wish he had done so oftener. Some of the other
story collections of the period are: Santa

and Sita Chatterjee’s Tales of Bengal (1922), M.V. Venkata- swami’s

Heeramma and Venkataswami or Folk Tales From India

(1923); Shyam Shrnker’s Wit and Wisdom of India: A Collection

of Folk Tales (1924); P. Padmanabha Iyer’s Indian Tales (1924);

Muhammad Habib's The Desecrated Bones and Other Stories

(1925); G. Shiva Rao’s (pseud. S.V. Gulwadi) The Optimist and

Other Stories (1925); M.P. Sharma’s Awakening (1932); N. Rama-,

bhadran’s Kettle Drums (1933); Ramabai Trikannad’s Victory of

Faith and Other Stories (1935); Do wan Sharar’s Hindu Fairy

Tales (1936) and Eastern Tales (1944); A.V. Rao’s The Man in the Red Tie and
Other Stories (1942) and Glamour and Other Stories (1950); T.K. Venugopal’s
Tales of Kerala (1943); Ela Sen’s Darkening Days: Being Narratives of Famine-
stricken Bengal(1944), and Humayun Kabir’s Three Stories (1947).

REFERENCES

1. Jawaharlal Nehru: The Discovery of India (London, 1946), p. 303.

2. Sir Perceval Spear, Oxford History of Modern India". 1740-1947 (London.

1965), p. 341.

3. Sir Perceval Spear, India, A Modern History (Ann Arbor, 1961), p. 359.

4. R.C.' Majumdar, (ed.), History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. XI
(Bombay, 1969), p, 368.

5. Sir Perceval Spear, Oxford History of Modern India, p. 351.

6. A.R. Desai, Social Background of Indian Nationalism (Boitibay, 1948, 1976),

p. 279.

7. Quoted by S. Sridevi, Gandhi and the Emancipation of Women in India

(Hyderabad, 1969), pp. 76-77.

8. A.R. Desai, op. cit., p. 124.

9. The Aryan Path, September 1938, quoted by Bbabani Bhattapharya, Mahatma

Gandhi (New Delhi, 1977), p. 178.

10. ibid., p. 175.

U. ibid., p. 173.

12. Shyamale A. Narayan, Sudhin N. Ghose (New Delhi, 1973), p. 132.

13. Mulk Raj Anand, Apology for Heroism (Bombay, 1946), p. 15. 14. ibid., p.
67.

15. Raja Rao’s official date of birth is 21 November, 1909, but he was actually
born on 5 November, 1908. See M.K. Naik, Raja Rao (New York, 1972), p. 16.

16. C.R. Mandy, ‘Some Indian Authors in Candid Retrospect’, Writers

Workshop Miscellany, Eight (Calcutta, 1917), p. 19.

17. M.K. Naik, Raja Rao (New York, 1972), p. 104.

CHAPTER 5 The Asoka Pillar:
Independence and After
With the attainment of Independence on 15 August 1947 began a new era of
challenges and changes in Indian life. During the first twenty-five years of its
independence the nation underwent experiences which would have all but
shattered a country with less inner strength and latent resilience. But not only did
India face her challenges with at least some degree of adequacy, she was also
able to register not a little progress in many areas of national life.

In the political sphere, the first traumatic experience at the birth of the new
nation was that of Partition. The lack of adequate preparation and safeguards
when the country was hastily partitioned into India and Pakistan led to a
communal carnage of unprecedented proportions resulting in 600,000 deaths and
8.5 million refugees. Along with this, there was also the problem of the more
than five hundred princely states covering an area of approximately 7,000 square
miles, which had become technically independent with the lapse of British
paramountcy. They could, by refusing to merge with the Indian Union, have
plunged the country into political chaos but for Sardar Patel, who effected their
integration with the Union mostly by persuasion and where necessary, even by
force. The question of the integration of the other small foreign possessions in
India was also solved by negotiations in the case of the French settlement and by
direct action in that of Portuguese Goa. The political map of the country was
further re-drawn with the creation of linguis- tic states in 1956. Not less than
three brief but eventful wars were fought during this period: the encounter with
China in 1962 and the wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, the latter resulting
in the dismemberment of Pakistan and the creation of Bangla Desh. With the
death of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964 an age appeared to have ended. More recent
events including the clamping of the Emergency in 1975 and the resurgence of
democratic forces in the elections of 1977 followed only two years later by the
break-up of the Janata Party and the triumphant return of the Congress rule have
revealed both the unmistakable vitality of Indian democracy and its equally
obvious areas of vulnerability.

I n the economic sphere, the most significant developments were the

implementation of a number of Five Year Plans; the inception of large industrial
projects in the public sector and multipurpose river schemes; agrarian reforms in
which Vinoba Bhave's ‘Bhoodan’ movement of the nineteen fifties played a role
—brief and not entirely successful and yet typical of the

Indian ethos; Community Development Projects and the nationalization of Life

Insurance and banks. It is true that in spite of the resulting economic
development, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has actuallywidened
instead of getting bridged, owing to various factots such as the failure to check
the growth of population, inadequacies of planning, bureaucratic inefficiency,
popular apathy etc. This has led some foreign observers like David Selbourne1to
take an excessively pessimistic view of the Indian situation, but the fact remains
that there has been a vast and at least not totally unsuccessful experiment in
economic regeneration through purely democratic means, which, with all its
numerous shortcomings, has fen parallels in modern history. And the Atomic
implosion of 11 May, 1974 has opened up exciting possibilities of developmen
in the years to come.

The sweeping changes in the political and economic spheres were matched by a
virtual transformation in the social scene. Traditional social inequalities were
sought to be removed (though less in actual practice than in theory) by
progressive measures such as the Untouchability Offences Act of 1955 and
numerous schemes for the uplift of the Scheduled and Backward Castes and
Tribes. The Hindu Code Bill, which superseded the traditional personal laws of
the Hindus, was a revolutionary measure which sought to improve the position
of women. In education, there were notable quantitative gains at all levels, the
percentage of literacy rising by 75% between 1951 and 1971, though
continuously falling standards and growing student indiscipline proved to be a
chronic malaise, worsened by the lack of a purposive educational policy. But the
most disturbing phenomenon on the socio-political scene has been the steady
erosion of the idealism of the days of the freedom struggle, the new gods of self-
aggrandizement and affluence having rather too easily dethroned those of self-
less service and dedication to a cause.

One far-sighted decision taken at Independence was that India should remain a
member of the British Commonwealth. This ensured that while the political
bondage to Britain was destroyed, the cultural bonds not only remained secure
but actually became even stronger. As a result of this, there was an increased
interest in the study of English language and literature in India after
Independence, in spite of the vigorous and eminently justified efforts at the
development of regional languages and literatures, and the inevitably gro wing
importance of Hindi. In fact, English readership has continued to be far larger
than even that for Hindi. The continuity and growth of Indian English literature
thus remained assured even after Independence. Nor did this literature fail to
gain from the general climate of Governmental patronage to art and literature.
For instans^, the prestigeous Sahitya Akademi awards started covering Indian
English literature from the year I960. A further impetus to its growth and
popularity was provided by English journals in India, some already flourishing
and others newly started. During the early years of Independence, C.R. Mandy,
the new editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India began encouraging the
publication of fndian English verse and fiction and thus provided a much-needed
forum for this literature. Quest (now New Quest) which did a similar service,
started publication in 1955, and there have been several other journals which
publish both creative and critical writing. These include Indian Literature, Indian
Writing Today, The Literary Criterion, The Literary Half- Yearly, The Writers
Workshop Miscellany, Poetry India, The Poet, Indian Verse, Litter it, Minimax.
The Indian Literary Review, Tenor, The Indian Journal of English Studies and
many others. There is now also a journal exclusively devoted to Indian English
literature viz., The Journal of Indian Writing in English, (est. 1973), and another
devoted to reviews alone: The Indian Book Chronicle (est 1976). And books by
Indian English writers have been made easily accessible to the common reader in
cheap popular editions, such as Writers Workshop flexibacks, and Orient and
Sterling Paperbacks etc.

Commenting on what he calls 'the relative stagnation of all the arts in India’, in
the mid-sixties, George Woodcock wrote:

'India is going through a vast and lengthy social revolution and periods of
revolution are usually accompanied by a retreat towards conservatism in the arts
(e.g. Neo-classicism in the French revolution and the Empire; the dull realism in
Russia in the early nineteen twenties, the sterility of the Cromwellian
interregnum). Even intellectuals at such times become preoccupied with action
and life, in its perilous flux, seems more fascinating than art, its transmutation.
The artist dwindles into a recorder, or, at best, an embellisher, rather than a
creator. ... We may well have to wait until a less socially conscious generation,
for India to produce writers who will do justice to the absorbing variety of her
land and life.’

There could not be a more mistaken reading of the literary situation in post-
Independence India and it is all the more astonishing that it should have come
from one who knew his India so well. Actually, the writer in Independent India,
whether in English or in the regional languages has, far from dwindling into a
'recorder’ or an 'embellisher’, has provided ample evidence of increased creative
vigour and capacity for experimentation. As far as Indian English literature is
concerned, novels like The Serpent and the Rope and The Guide (both of which
appeared after Independence) and All About H. Hatterr (1950), the poetry of
Ezekiel, Ramanujan and Kamala Das and the prose of Nirad Chaudhuri are
conclusive proof of this freshness and virility. The right parallels here are not, as
Woodcock suggests, the French or the Russian Revolution or the Cromwellian
interregnum. An appropriate analogue is to be found in modern West African
literature, which also was a product of a newly found nationalist spirit. As
Arthur Ravenscroft puts it, ‘Their (The Africans’) literary achievements have
enriched the English language and helped to keep it a supple artistic medium, at
a time when much metropolitan writing in Britain and the United States has
become jaded and dehumanised and merely cynical.’3 This could be said with
equal justice of the best modern Indian English literature also.

It is possible to argue that the rightful assumption of a recognized national

identity after 1947 has proved a great gain for the Indian English writer. It has
given him greater self- confidence, widened his vision and sharpened his faculty
of self- scrutiny. Nor could conditions to function in have been more congenial.
Interest in Indian English literature has grown tremendously both in India and
abroad, thus making possible a much larger readership than it could claim at any
time earlier. In spite of some early and hasty attempts to circumscribe the role of
English in post-Independence India, the importance of this world-language for a
nation which had after centuries regained its legitimate place in international
councils came to be increasingly recognized, and this provided a further impetus
to the study of English language and literature. Indian English literature has
naturally benefited by this development, as also by the increasing attention won
abroad by Indian art and culture after Independence. The post-Independence
Indian scene with its curious criss-cross of rapid socio-political changes in a
country where tradition still remains a strong force has presented a stimulating
spectacle, which has naturally evoked a variety of reactions from its writers,
including nostalgic idealization of the immediate past of the days of the freedom
struggle, a strong desire to re-discover one’s roots in the ancient Indian ethos as
also to examine this ethos afresh in the light of westernization, and satirical
comment both on the darker side of the freedom movement and its aftermath and
the decline of values in all spheres of life in the present.
As a total result of these developments, important gains were registered
especially in fiction, poetry and criticism. Fiction, already well-established, grew
in both variety and stature; poetry, shedding its anaemic romantic uncertainties
became, at its best, vigorous and truly modern; and soon after the publication of
K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar's Indian Writing in English (1962), works of Indian
English writers began to be studied in depth both in India and abroad, thus
providing the right critical climate in which this literature could examine itself
and identify the sources of its own strength and weakness.
Poetry
It is in poetry that the post-Independence period witnessed the most crucial
developments. In the fifties arose a school of poets who tried to turn their backs
on the romantic tradition and write a verse more in tune with the age, its general
temper and its literary ethos. They tried, with varying degrees of success, to
naturalize in the Indian soil the modernistic elements derived from the poetic
revolution effected by T.S. Eliot and others in the twentieth century British and
American poetry. The Indian English romantic tradition is not however yet
completely extinct and in fact; paradoxically enough, its finest product was to
appear immediately after Independence: Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri was published
in its final form in 1950-51, apart from his Last Poems(1952), More Poems
(1953) and the epic Ilion (1957), all of which appeared posthumously during this
period. The school of Aurobindo is also seen to be active as in the earlier period,
rather pantingly trying to follow in the giant footsteps of the master. The chief
poets of the school include Dilip Kumar Roy (Eyes of Light, 1948), Themis
(Poems, 1952), Rdmen (The Golden Apocalypse, 1953), Prithvi Singh Nahar
(The Winds of Silence, 1954), Prithvindra N. Mukherjee (A Rose-Bud’s Song,
1959) and V. Madhusudan Reddy (Sapphires of Solitude, 1960) The verse of
K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar in Tryst With the Divine (1974).Mytrocosmographia
Poetica (1976) and Leaves from a Log (1979) and that of V.K. Gokak in Song of
Life and Other Poems(1947), In Life’s Temple (1965) and Kashmir and the
Blind Man (1977)

also reveals the strong influence of Sri Aurobindo. Their most characteristic note
is one of quiet and sometimes insightful rumination. Among other writers of
romantic verse may be mentioned Adi K. Sett (The Light Above the Clouds,
1948; Rain in My Heart, 1954), B.D. Sastri (Tears of Faith, 1950), K.R.R. Sastri
(Gathered Flowers, 1956), Barjor Paymaster (The Last Farewell and other
Poems, 1960); Trilok Chandra (A Hundred and One Flowers, 1961); Rai Vyas
(Jai Hind, 1961); and P.V.B. Sharma(Morning Buds, 1964).

By the fifties, the ‘new poetry’ had already made its appearance. In 1958, P.
Laland his associates founded the Writers Workshop in Calcutta which soon
became an effective forum for modernist poetry. The Workshop manifesto
described the school as consisting of /a group' of writers who agree in principle
that English has proved its ability, as a language, to play a creative role in Indian
literature, through original writings and transcreation.’ The Workshop
‘Miscellany’ was to be ‘devoted to creative writing’, giving ‘preference to
experimental work by young and unpublished writers’. The first modernist
anthology was Modern Indo-Anglian Poetry (1958) edited by P. Lal and K.
Raghavendra Rao. In a somewhat brash Introduction the editors condemned
‘greasy, weak-spined and pur-

ple-adjectived “spiritual poetry” ’ and ‘the blurred and rubbery sentiments of..
.Sri Aurobindo’ and declared that ‘the phase of Indo-Anglian romanticism ended
with Sarojini Naidu.’ They affirmed their faith in ‘a vital language’ which ‘must
not be a total travesty of the current pattern of speech,’ commended ‘the effort to
experiment,’ advocated a poetry that dealt ‘in concrete terms with concrete
experience,’ and emphasized ‘the need for the private voice,’ especially because
we live in an age that tends so eiasily to demonstrations of mass-approval and
hysteria.’

The first of the ‘new’ poets to publish a collection was Nissim Ezekiel (1924—),
easily one of the most notable postIndependence Indian English writers of verse.
His A Time to Change appeared in 1952, to be followed by Sixty Poems
(1953),The Third (1959), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965)
and Hymns in Darkness (1976). A major shaping factor in Ezekiel’s poetry is
that he belongs to a Bene-Isracl family which migrated to India generations ago.
Thus substantially alienated from the core of the Indian ethos, Ezekiel is acutely
aware of this alienation being accentuated by the fact that he has spent most of
his life in highly westernized circles in cosmopolitan Bombay. With Marathi (on
his own admission) as his ‘lost mother tongue’ and English as his ‘second
mother tongue’, Ezekiel’s quest for integration made for a restless career of
quick changes and experiments including ‘philosophy/ poverty and poetry’ in a
London basement room, and attempts at journalism, publishing and advertising
—and even a spell of working as a factory manager—before he settled down as a
university teacher in his ‘bitter native city’.

The alienation theme is thus central to Ezekiel’s work and colours his entire
poetic universe. This explains his early fascination for Rilke, though he learnt his
poetic craft from Eliot and Auden, whom he frequently echoes in his early verse.
‘A refugee of the spirit’ in search of his ‘dim identity’, which in different moods
appears to him to be either a ‘one man lunatic asylum’ or ‘a small deserted holy
place’, Ezekiel experiments with three different solutions to his problem. The
easiest way out is a protective assumption of easy superiority expressing itself in
surface irony as in his ‘Very Indian’ poems ‘in Indian English’, in which the
obvious linguistic howlers of Indian students are pilloried with metropolitan
snobbishness. In a more generous mood, he gives himself the testimonial of
being ‘a good native’ and tells himself (perhaps more loudly than is necessary) ‘I
cannot leave this island/I was born here and belong.’ Then despair takes over
and he ruefully accepts his failure (in Rilke’s words) ‘to weave himself more
closely into things’ and confesses, ‘My backward place is where I am.’

But at his best Ezekiel does succeed in creating something more than minor
verse out of his alienation as in ‘Night of the Scorpion’, which is one of the
finest poems in recent Indian English literature. Here, the tale, which lies in the
sting, is told by an observer, who is neither flippantly ironical nor antisepti- cally
detached; on the contrary, he invests the poem with deep significance by trying
to understand the Indian ethos and its view of evil and suffering, though he
makes no claim to sharing it.

Another persistent motif is an obsessive sense of failure, leading to agonized

bouts of self-doubt and self-laceration, revealing the poet ‘in exile from himself.’
This has strongly coloured Ezekiel’s poetry of love and marriage also. Art and
the artist is yet another theme to which the poet, who goes with ‘a Cezanne slung
round his neck', returns time and again. In.Jamini Roy, the painter, he finds an
ideal which he himself has failed to attain—an artist who‘travelled, so he found
his roots,’ an urban artist who rediscovered the ‘law’ of folk art, with impressive
results. The metaphysical theme touched upon occasionally in the earlier verse
(Ezekiel was once a student of philosophy, one remembers) is specially stressed
in the recent Dymns in Darkness, though the poet makes no serious attempt to
find ‘a final formula of light’ and concludes rather tamely that ‘Belief will not
save you/Nor unbelief.’ There are also a number of bird and animal poems
which remind one of Ted Hughes, though the British poet’s hairy-chested
toughness gives place here to quiet musing on problems of poetry and existence.

Ezekiel’s poetry reveals technical skill of a high order. Except in his later work
where his choice of an open form sometimes makes for looseness, he has always
written verse which is extremely tightly constructed. His mastery of the
colloquial idiom is matched by a sure command of rhythm and rhyme. A happy
use of cool understatement (e.g., ‘A certain happiness would be to die’) and a
lapidary quality have made him one of the most quotable poets of his generation
(e.g. ‘Home is where we have to gather grace’). Though hardly a poet with the
shatter- ingly original image, he employs the extended metaphor effectively in
poems like ‘Enterprise.’
When he is writing below his best, Ezekiel occasionally lapses into faded
romanticism (e.g., ‘tumult of despair’) or indulges in cleverness (e.g., ‘Pretence,
to pretend, I pretend’), but except when he deliberately adopts the ironic mode,
his verse generally maintains a studied neutrality of tone, which suits his natural
stance of the alienated observer. It is, however, in the overtones as in -‘Night of
the Scorpion' that Ezekiel gives intimations of a talent which is certainly capable
of major poetic utterance.

Towards the end of the ’fifties, Dom Moraes (1938—) the first of the ‘new’
poets to win recognition in England, appeared on the scene (His first book won
the Hawthornden Prize in 1938). Son of Frank Moraes, the well-known Indian
journalist, Dom Moraes lived in England for many years, having adopted British
citizenship in 1961, He has studiedly disowned his Indian heritage repeatedly. 'I
am Indian by birth, but I have lived in England since I was a boy and I hold a
British passport. The historical accident of British rule in India worked on my
family so that I lived an English life there and spoke no Indian language. ... So
English was my outlook, I found I could not fit in India. When eventually I came
to England, I fitted in at once.’* Again, ‘In Europe I had positive emotions; in
India I sank into the dream in which my whole country was sunk.’5 He has also
produced the certificate of Verrier Elwin who reportedly told him, ‘You are a
very English person. Your reactions aren’t Indian.’* Nevertheless, it is
impossible to think of Dom Moraes as anything but an Indian English poet and
The Penguin Companion to Literature rightly describes him as an ‘Indian Poet’.7
Born in a Goan Christian family, Moraes, an only son, had an excruciatingly
troubled and insecure childhood and adolescence during which his mother’s
frequent bouts of insanity were a persistent nightmare, as his autobiography, My
Son's Father, reveals. The varied repercussions of this traumatic experience and
his attempts to come to terms with them in adult life form the driving force
behind his verse in A Beginning (1957), Poems (1960) and John Nobody (1968).
His Poems 1955-1965appeared in 1966 and his Collected Poems in 1969.
Deeply influenced by Dylan Thomas and the surrealistic school, Moraes’s is a
highly personal poetry with a persistent confessional tone and its recurring
themes are loneliness and insecurity from which escape is sought either in the
erotic fantasies of a febrile imagination or the self-probing of a tortured soul. His
verse often creates a haunted world in which classical, Christian, medieval and
fairy tale myths are mixed and dragons and dwarfs, Cain and the unicorn, the
tombs of Mycenae and Christ come together. He finds himself ‘unloved and
forlorn’ and his fate is to ‘seem/unreal to myself.’ When his quest is imbued
with an urgent intensity, Moraes writes memorable poems like ‘The Visitor’ in
which there is a fruitful exploration of the poet’s own psyche (e.g., ‘I shall be he
whom you will never find/Except in me’). His love poems can be incandescent
but sometimes also lapse either into metaphysical conceit (e.g., ‘The
high/Mountain of her body that I was to climb’) or romantic cliches (e.g., ‘I have
furnished my heart to be her nest’). His imagery has a strong sensuous quality
(e.g., ‘the curds/Of sea’—an image, by the way, which, in spite of all his
protestations to the contrary, so obviously stamps him as an Indian English poet)
and of all his contemporaries he has perhaps the finest ear for the rhythms of
modern English. What never fails in Moraes’s verse is the easy, refined and
controlled fiow of language. Moraes has not published a new collection of verse
for almost a decade now and appears to have turned to prose. Though he would
have us believe that ‘I have dropped my root and struck,* his verse has shown
little evidence of any startling development consequent upon the reportedly
successful transplantation, since he became a British citizen almqst a generation
ago.

During the nineteen sixties, several prominent ‘new’ poets appeared, the earliest
of whom was P. Lal (1929—). Born in the Punjab, Purushottam Lalmigrated to
Calcutta with his parents at the age of one. Educated in this city, Lalnow teaches
English there. His verse collections include The Parrot's Death and Other Poems
(1960), "Change!” They Said (1966), Draupadi and Jayadratha and Other Poems
(1967), Yakshi from Didarganj and Other Poems (1969), The Man of Dharma
and the Rasa of Silence (1974) and Calcutta: A Long Poem (1977). His
Collected Poems appeared in 1977. He has also published creative translations of
The Bhagawad Gita (1965), The Dhamma pada (1967) and Ghalib's Love Poems
(1971). His verse ‘trans

creation* of The Mahabharata of which more than 110 slender volumes have so
far appeared is an ambitious project begun in 1968.

Lal's early verse, ‘Vocal/ In times of beauty’, is full of ‘apples and birds’, ‘white
roses and bees’ and ‘dew filigree- ing the grass’. He is also fascinated by the
sound of words. ‘The melodic pattern ... is to me all-important,’ he declares in
his preface to the Collected Poems (e.g. ‘The ... bee/.. . silent upon the incessant
aftemoon/Distils its summer share of ecstasy’). This verse has, at its best, the
delicacy and charm of Sung landscape painting. With “Change”, They Said, the
poet is seen to enter a world of increasing awareness of social realities and life’s
sorrows, and passes from ‘An Encounter with God in a Rose Garden’to‘The
Refugees at Sealdah station’ and the ‘Middle class deploring/Economic
disparity/. ... In the strangulated bus’. However, these later perceptions have not
yet firmly crystallized.

Of Lal'stwo long poems, The Man of Dharma and the Rasa of Silence traces
Yudhisthira’s passage ‘through the spectrum of the eight rasas till he arrives at. .
. the rasa of silence.’ Lalis obviously attempting here a poetic statement about
the

modern human condition, making a symbolic use of a well- known figure from
the Mahabharata, and the theory of rasa from Sanskrit aesthetics. However, the
symbolism is vague and the attempted re-classification of rasas unconvincing.
The style is cluttered up with stale romantic adjectives like ‘puissant’ and
‘radiant’—a feature surprising in a poet who had earlier berated all romantic
claptrap. Calcutta fails for different reasons. The poet’s vision of his ‘broken
city’ with its shocking contrasts has actually turned out to be rather fragmentary
and casual. The various characters like Mervyn D’ Mellow, Deben- dranath
Basu, etc., are not fully realized and the section of Mother Teresa—‘the essential
witness figure’, which is supposed to be the ‘cohering centre’ of the poem fails
to be organically connected with the rest. The prose essay on Calcutta which
forms the ‘Interlude’ further destroys all hopes of poetic unity. Lal'searly work
still remains his best, while his contribution as a pioneer, popularizer and
effective champion

of the new poetry is undeniably substantial.

Adil Jussawalla’s (1940—) first book of verse, Land's End (1962) contains
poems‘written in England and some parts of Europe.’ Unlike Dom Moraes,
however, Jussawalla chose to return to India after a sojourn of more than dozen
years in England and has since published another collection, Missing Person
(1974). Jussawalla’s usual strategy in Land's End is to project a clearly
visualized situation and then comment on it, bringing out either the personal or
social or existential significance latent in it. The sight of a tree shedding its
leaves in autumn makes him pray: ‘So let my thoughts/Mottled, stale and
yellow/Be swept into some gutter in the eye’; And the memory of hymn-singing
at school recalls the ‘ragged sweeper urchins’ outside who ‘gazed mutely/At our
singing.’ His setting is western here and so is his framework of reference, which
includes Achilles and Virgil, Rodin and Van Gogh, ‘Your Ladies of Brussels’
and ‘furious Cossack children’. Even the Tamil waiters in a London restaurant in
‘The Waiters’ are made to ‘stand aloof’ from the poet.
The exile's return, his recapitulation of his foreign experience, his reaction to his
native scene and his continued quest for selfknowledge form the chief themes of
Missing Person. The poet’s conscious involvement with the Indian ethos is clear
from the fact that Achilles is now set in juxtaposition with Vidura and ‘a gigantic
Shiva thrust* accompanies ‘a Black and Decker drill’. As his aeroplane hovers
over Santa Cruz airport, the poet feels that ‘the poor, invisible/Show ms my
place; that in the air/With the scavenger birds, I ride.’ In spite of quite a few
telling insights like these, Missing Person, however does not quite add up to a
completely unified poetic testament, the total effect being that of a sensitive
talent not yet fully under artistic control.

The most outstanding poet of the sixties is easily A.K. Ramanujan (1929—)
another exile who, unlike Jussawalla, has not chosen to return, and continues to
teach Dravidian Linguistics at the University of Chicago. His first volume, The
Striders (1966) won a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Relations followed
in 1971. He has aiso translated into English poetry in Tamil and Kannada in The
Interior Landscape (1967) and Speaking of Siva (1972) respectively. Ramanujan
has said, ‘English and my disciplines (linguistics, anthropology) give me my
“outer” forms—linguistic, metrical, logical and other such ways-of shaping
experience, and my first thirty years in India, my frequent visits and field trips,
my personal and professional preoccupations with Kannada, Tamil, the classics
and Folklore give me my substance, my “inner” forms, images, symbols.’8 His
poetry thus draws its sustenance from his intense awareness of his racial burden,
his Hindu heritage. ‘Imust seek and will find/My particular hell in my Hindu
mind’ is his motto. This awareness does not, however, lead to blind acceptance,
for the poet is equally alive to both the strength and the deficiencies of his racial
ethos. He admires its vision of unity of all life as in ‘Christmas’, which stresses
the impossibility of knowing ‘leaf from parrot/Or branch from root/Nor ... that

trec/From you or me’; and he notes its great absorbing power by picturing a
typical joint family in ‘Small-scale Reflections on a Great House’. At the same
time, he does not fail to notice its inability to satisfy completely the modern
mind, which cannot reconcile itself easily to the presence of elemental evil in life
(e.g. ‘The Hindoo: he reads his Gita and is calm at all events’). He pillories the
cowardice that may pass for gentleness (e.g. ‘The Hindoo: he doesn’t Hurt a Fly
or spider either’) and the patient equanimity which may degenerate into sheer
hcartlessness (e.g. ‘The Hindoo: The Only Risk’). He deprecates its uncritical
acceptance of tradition and its neglect of the individual, as when he describes
how the ancient Tamil poets praised the river in flood and ‘The new poets still
quoted/ The old poets, but no one spoke/ln veise/Ot the pregnant
woman/drowned.’

Occasionally, Ramanujan also tries to juxtapose ironically the ancient Hindu

ethos with the situation of the modern Hindu as in ‘Some Indian uses of History
on a Rainy Day’ and contrasts the Hindu and Western world-views as in
‘Christmas’.

The ‘ancient hands’ at the poet’s ‘throat’ include the ancestors of his persona
too. While the Tamil epigraph to Relationsstates that ‘living/Among
relations/Binds the feet,’ Ramanujan’s persona finds his entire anatomy ‘bred in
an ancestor’s bone’, His self-portrait is that ‘of a stranger/Date unknown/Often
signed in a corner/By my father.’ ‘Ancestral crocodiles and tortoises’ haunt his
imagination. This makes for a poetry in which memory plays a vigorous,
creative role. It is not ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ but recollection
emotionalised in un-tranquil moments that is the driving force behind much of
Ramanujan’s poetry. Time and again, ‘a hood/ Of memory like a coil on a heath’
unfolds itself in his mind. This memory is fruitfully creative when it attempts an
almost total recall of sensuous childhood impressions of fear, sorrow or death as
in ‘Snakes’, ‘Breaded Fish’ and ‘The Opposable thumb’; and also when
recollection takes on an ironic flavour as a childhood impression recalled years
later and properly understood from the vantage ground of adulthood suddenly
yields a surprisingly new significance (e.g. ‘History’).

Owing to Ramanujan’s obvious preoccupation with motifs of ancestral heritage

and memory, his few love poems have not received the attention they deserve.
His attempt to square ‘the ancient circle/of you and me’ is fascinating in its
varying moods. His lover complains that he cannot recall the face and the words
of his absent beloved, though his memory is cluttered up with all kinds of
footling details. ‘Love Poem for a Wife!* is a revealing comment on how an
unshared childhood separates a devoted couple and ‘Still Life’ is a celebration of
love as an abiding presence. These love poems are remarkable for their quiet but
deep emotion, their fineness of perception and their treatment of the unusual in
one of the most basic human experiences.

In poetic technique, of all his contemporaries, Ramanujan appears to have the

surest touch, for he never lapses into romantic cliche. His unfailing sense of
rhythm gives a fitting answer to those who hold that complete inwardness with
language is possible only to a poet writing in his mother tongue. Though he
writes in open forms, his verse is extremely tightly constructed. He can also
surprise us with a startlingly apt adjective as in ‘the naked parting of her hair’ or
blend image and word music perfectly as when he describes snakes as ‘writing a
sibilant alphabet of panic/On my floor.’

While his technical accomplishment is indisputable and his thematic strategy

exactly the right one for a poet in his situation, one is not so sure that during the
dozen years and more that he has been writing, Ramanujan has fully exploited
the opportunities his material offers him. His articulation of the Hindu ethos has
so far produced (with a few notable exceptions) poetry of the periphery and not
the centre of the Hindu experience. His poetry of memory gives us much that is
of human interest but remains, on the whole, severely restricted to the social
plane of experience alone, seldom attempting higher or more more subtle
evocations; and the love poems are only a small handful. A later poem like
'Prayers to Lord Murugan’ even reveals a curious uncertainty in his reaction to
Hinduism. Perhaps Ramanujan has yet to come fully to terms with his heritage
and is still feeling his way. Meanwhile, he has effectively demonstrated to his
contemporaries the supreme importance of having roots and has also shown
glimpses of the vitality 4he work of a poet acquires when he succeeds even
partially in this attempt.

A fellow Tamil and and an artist equally urgently concerned with his native
heritage is R. Parthasarathy (1934—), a poet acutely conscious of the complex
relationship between ‘the hour glass of the Tamil mind’ and ‘the exact
chronometer of Europe*. ‘There is something to be said for exile,’ he declares,
‘you learn roots are deep.’ Parthasarathy has told the story of his poetic
development with remarkable objectivity in his essay, ‘Whoring After English
Gods.’* He began as a young and hopeful poet ‘hypercritical of everything
Indian’ and convinced that ‘England would be my future home. And the English
language will help me to belong there’—a hope shattered by his sojourn in
England. He returned with ‘a new understanding of myself and India.’ The
pendulum then swung to the other extreme. He thought that his ‘prolonged and
tempestuous* affair with the English language was over and that he had ‘settled
down with Tamil.’ He even declared, ‘I now firmly believe that I should not
write poems in any other language but Tamil.’ Fortunately, Parthasarathy
returned to his first love and published Rough Passage (1977). His poetry
illustrates the truth of his statement: ‘English forms a part of my intellectual,
rational make-up, Tamil of my emotional, psychic make-up. .. The situation
itself is poetry.’)10 Written over a period of fifteen years (1961-75), Roug
Passage is a poem in three parts dealing with the theme of identity exposed to
two cultures. The poet himself explains his strategy thus: ‘ “Exile”, the first part,
opposes the culture of Europe with that of India, and examines the cpnsequences
of British rule on an Indian, especially the loss of identity with his own culture
and, therefore, the need for roots. Against the turmoil of non-relationship,
personal love holds forth the promise of belonging, and the second part, “Trial”,
celebrates love as a reality here and now. “Homecoming”, the third and final
part.. . explores the phenomenon of returning to one’s home.'11

The actual ‘achieved content’ of Rough Passage, however, leaves one wondering
whether the poet has, in fact, accomplished all this in the poem. The long period
over which the work was written and the constant revisions to which the poet
himself has testified are perhaps responsible for a general effect of
disjointedness. While it has many evocative passages, it is doubtful whether the
poem succeeds in projecting an integrated vision of a whole country’s culture in
transition. Rough Passagefails to be a national odyssey, but remains an evocative
record of a highly sensitive Indian’s personal peregrination, which is also an
eventful journey within. Precision and economy are the hallmarks of
Parthasarathy’s poetic technique. Though he complains of his tongue being ‘in
English chains’, he manipulates the ‘chains’ with remarkable adroitness. His
penchant for domestic imagery (e.g., ‘mother’s turmeric days’, ‘rice-and- pickle
afternoons’) again underscores his unceasing concern for roots—a concern
which holds out the promise of far more substantial work in future.

Gieve Patel’s (1940—) first book, Poems appeared in 1966, and his second,
How Do you Withstand, Body in 1976. A member of the small Parsi community,
Patel is an ‘outsider’ like Ezekiel and is equally conscious of the fact (e.g., ‘The
ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel, he being neither Muslim nor Hindu in India*),
but this has not produced a feeling of rootlessncss in his case. A strong sense of
compassion establishes, for him some kind of a bond between himself and the
under-privileged— a leprous woman (in ‘Nargol’) or the ’brown whores’ of
Bombay (in ’Tourists at Grant Road’) or domestic servants (in ‘Servants’) for
example—and sets his nagging social conscience working. Being a medical
practitioner by profession, Patel is all too familiar with pain, disease and death
and tries to talk about them with clinical detachment, which cannot, however,
completely obliterate his deep human sympathies (e.g. 'Post-Mortem Report’).
Patel’s is mostly ‘situational’ poetry. He begins with a concrete real life situation
[e.g. the poet watching the celebration of a Hindu festival ('Naryal Purnima’);
‘Grand Parents at a Family Get-Together’ etc.] which triggers off his personal
response. He has little use for image and metaphor (rather surprising in a poet
who is also a painter) and generally expresses himself in a bare, spare, colloquial
style, allowing himself only the services of a deflating irony as a counter weight
to his compassion. In his more recent work, Patel appears to make lesser use of
the situational strategy, choosing a more directly reflective style but has not yet
mastered the new mode.

In contrast with Patel, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (1947—) writes a poetry in

which the image is all-dominant. He is the author of b aratmata: a prayer (sic)
(1966), Woodcuts on Pape. (1967), PomesjPoems/Poemas (1971), and Nine
Enclosures (1976). Mehrotra has described himself as ‘not an Indian poet but a
poet writing a universal language of poetry, of feeling, of love, and hate and
sex.’12His true affinities are with Surrealist poetry. In Mehrotra’s poetic world
pyramids come and knock at the gate; a skull contains rivers; the rose has bones
which sprout feathers; the ‘torn skin dances’ and ‘a naked man/ a Flat-eye goat
upon his back/Runs up the steps of sunset.’ In this forest of symbols, with its
tangled undergrowth of images, we find the poet groping about, trying to express
his response to the modernman’s predicament in a world of debased values— a
struggle not always successful, though it is quite in keeping with Mehrotra’s
poetic creed according to which a poem comprises ‘games, riddles and
accidents. . .and the poet'creates as many accidents as he can.’13The early satire,
bharatmata is a much simpler but a less challenging work. Mehrotra’s footloose
style recalls Whitman and Hart Crane, but unlike these poets at their best he has
not yet achieved completely integrated expression.

Another poet in whom Whitmanism and Surrealism appear to meet (with Tagore
forming a third ingredient) is Pritish Nandy (1947—), a prolific writer who has
produced more than a dozen collections including Of Gods and Olives (1967),
The Poetry of Pritish Nandy (1973) and Tonight This Savage Rite (1977), within
a decade. Nandy*s verse gives the impression of wild energy and verbal
belligerence only occasionally amenable to discipline a verse of which nimiety is
at once a source of power and a weakness. His imagination seems to be obsessed
with urban violence and horror, death and sex, and brings together Aphrodite
and Shakuntala, Shehnai strains and ariettas, raktakarabis and hyacinths. His
most characteristic form is prose-poetry in which he achieves a stirringly
incantatory quality in poems like ’Calcutta, if you must exile me.’ On occasion,
he is also capable of a controlled intensity of compassion, as in ‘Near
Deshapriya Park They Found Him at last,’ though his verse far too often appears
to be perched on the brink of sheer rhetoric.
The nineteen seventies witnessed the arrival of K.N, Daruwalla, Shiv K. Kumar,
Jayanta Mahapatra and Arun Kolatkar. Keki N. Daruwalla (1937—), one of the
most substantial of modern Indian English poets, has so far published Under
Orion (1970),Apparition in April (1971) and Crossing of Rivers (1976). He is a
police officer by profession and this fact is not without significance in
understanding his response to men and matters. The words of one of the most
famous police officers in fiction are relevant here. Georges Simenon’s Inspector
Maigret observes, ‘We see. . . all sorts of men and women in the most
unbelievable situations at every social level. We see them, we take note, we try
to understand. . . our job is to study men. We watch their behaviour.’14
Daruwalla too observes the Indian scene with a trained eye but cannot, in spite
of his training, remain absolutely detached. Though he declares, ‘Between my
pity and contempt/I find no difference,’ the difference to him is unmistakably
there. He is determined to avoid the ‘maudlin mud’ of sentimentality, but
deprivation and misery, disease and death move him acutely, often making his
satire ‘drip with bile and acid’. Daruwalla brings a combination of these attitudes
to bear on his view of the rioting mob, the tub- thumping politician, ‘Evangelical
Eva’ and 'Rotarian Renu’, the Maulvi who dies of tongue cancer, the leper at the
Taj, the ledge-walker, the epileptic woman, the bandit chief and many others.
His view of religion—whether his own, the Zoroastrian, or Hindu—is
characterized by a modern'scepticism tempered by a lively human curiosity as in
his vignettes of Benaras, ‘the octopus city’ in ‘The Water Front’. Daruwalla’s
favourite images are those of violence (the gun goes off on many pages), disease
(e.g., The Taj is ‘domed leprosy’, rain is ‘arthritic’ and the river ‘dark as
gangrene’) and fire (a by-product of his Parsi heritage, after all?). In his latest
work, Daruwalla appears to be moving from acute perception of the social scene
to a more inward kind of poetry, which, however, is yet to take on the
incisiveness of his earlier verse.

Shiv K. Kumar (1921 —) is a senior academic who published his first volume
Articulate Silences (1970) when on the threshold of fifty. This was followed by
Cobwebs in the Sun (1974), Subterfuges (.1976) and Woodpeckers (1979). His
work reveals a mastery of both the confessional mode and ironic comment. In
the poems of the first type, he often successfully subjects intensely felt emotion
to a neat ordering of notations of intimate personal details, creating patterns out
of ‘nerves.. . / Twisted, knotted and tortured’. His persona sometimes takes a
dark view of love (e.g., ‘Loving you/Is like walking on trecherous ice’), sex (e.g.
‘lashing our diabetic bodies/Into a semblance of orgasm’) and marriage (e.g.,
‘We wear each other/Like soiled underwear’), but is also occasionally capable of
more delicate perceptions as in ‘A man should come to his woman whole—/ Not
when the mind is a perverted sunflower/Tutning to darkness,’ as also of the quiet
domestic idyll as in ‘My little Daughter*. In contrast to this, poems like
‘Cambridge Revisited’, ‘Kovalam Beach’ and ‘A letter from New York’ reveal a
talent for expertly pillorying human inadequacies. A much travelled poet, Kumar
lias a foreign setting for many of his poems, while his references to the
‘Hegelian dialectic’ and 'Leibniz’s monad’ and his use of phrases like ‘eidolons
of proration’ and ‘gynous truth’ are typical of the university don. But he is also
full of witty sallies, as for instance, ‘the thigh is the limit’ and ‘To hoot down
hourly/Our routine loves/Till death do not us part’; and his verse always moves
with a seemingly casual but assured gait.

Jayanta Mahapatra (1928—), another academic, began his career with Close the
Sky, Ten by Ten (1971) and has since published Svayamvara and Other Poems
(1971) A Rain of Rites (1976) Waiting (1979), Relationship (1980, Sahitya
Akademi Award, 1981) and The False Start (1980). Mahapatra’s poetry is
redolent of the Orissa scene and the Jagannatha temple at Puri figures quite often
in it. His most characteristic note is one of quiet but often ironic reflection
mostly concerning love, sex and sensuality in the earlier poetry and the social
and political scene in some of the later poems. His style has an admirable
colloquial ease, punctuated by thrusts of striking images as, for instance, his
lean-to opened like wound’ and ‘the one wide street/Lolls out like a giant
tongue.’ His muted brooding occasionally results in extremes of either
excessively cryptic statement or verbal redundancy and in weaker moments he is
seen echoing other poets, as in the Eliotesque ‘mornings/Like pale yellow
hospital linen’; but his better work indicates a poetic voice which promises to
gather strength in the years to come.

Arun Kolatkar (1932—) is that rare phenomenon among modern Indian English
poets—a bilingual poet, writing both in English and in his mother tongue
(Marathi, in this case) His shorter poems in English are still uncollected, but his
long poem,Jejuri appeared in 1976 and won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.
Many of Kolatkar’s shorter poems, like Meh- rotra’s, present a dark, surrealistic
vision in which his persona’s ‘loin has bared its teeth’; the cat ‘knows dreaming
as an administrative problem’; and a hag ‘devours oranges/In self- defence.’ In
Jejuri, the technique yields better results. The thirty-one short sections of the
poem describe a visit to Jejuri, a famous temple near Pune. The poet’s
impressions of the temple are juxtaposed with those at the railway station at the
end. The surrealistic similarites startlingly disclose how at both the places (and
no two places could be more dissimilar) there is the same blind faith in ossified
tradition and the establishment, the same exclusiveness and the same
dilapidation and general deadness. The penultimate section, 'Between Jejuri and
the Railway station’ presents an experience which provides a sharp contrast: ‘A
dozen cocks and hens in a field of Jawar/ In a kind of a harvest dance.’ This is
obviously a vision of primeval vigour and the joy of life sadly missing both from
the temple (i.e., religious tradition) and the railway station (machine
civilization). The poet is generally sceptical and ironic, though moments of
sympathy (as when he encounters an old beggar woman and a teenage wife) do
break in. The poem opens with a journey (to Jejuri) and closes with the return
journey in the offing, thus suggesting the motif of a quest.

Jejuri is hardly an Indian Waste Land (as some of its admirers seem to claim),
since it lacks both the impressive social and religious dimensions and the
complexity of that modern classic, but it is certainly an experiment in a fruitful
direction already indicated by A.K. Ramanujan—viz., a serious attempt by a
modern Indian English poet to review his ancient heritage. Jejuri could have
been a far more substantial achievement had the poet’s vision been less
fragmentary and had he not remained content with scratching the surface of the
problem.

Women poets form a sizable school in modern Indian English literature and the
most outstanding work, expressive of what Mary Erulkar has trenchantly called
‘the bitter service of womanhood’, is by Kamala Das (1934—), a bilingual writer
like Kolatkar. A distinguished author in her mother tongue, Malayalam, Kamala
Das has published three books of verse in English: Summer in Calcutta (1965),
The Descendants (1967) and The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973). The
most obvious (and to the casual reader colourful) feature of Kamala Das’s poetry
is the uninhibited frankness with which she talks about sex, referring
nonchalantly to 'the musk of sweat between the breasts’, ‘the warm shock of
menstrual blood,’ and even ‘my pubis’. But a closer reading proves that this is
not just a cheap exercise in stretching ‘my two-dimensional/Nudity on sheets of
weeklies,’ nor a wanton display of ‘thighs and sighs’, nor yet merely a case of
‘from bed to verse’. Kamala Das’s persona is no nymphomaniac; she is simply
‘every woman who seeks love'; she is ‘the beloved and the betrayed’, expressing
her ‘endless female hungers’, ‘the muted whisper at the core of womanhood’.
She may ‘flaunt... a grand, flamboyant lust’, but in her heart of hearts she
remains the eternal Eve proudly celebrating her essential femininity. If she lets
her ‘mind striptease’ and finds that ‘I must extrude/Autobio- graphy,’ those are
only attempts to understand and articulate ‘what I was and by learning, to learn
to grow.’

The persona’s experience, according to Kamala Das herself (as explained in her
autobiography, Kfy Story) evidently derives from a traumatic frustration in love
and marriage, compelling the victim to ‘run from one/Gossamer love to another,’
sadly realizing that ‘Love became a swivel-door/When one went out, another
came in.’ The result is confessional poetry obsessively mulling over love, sex
and the ‘body’s wisdom’. Several faces of Eve are exhibited here —woman as
sweetheart, flirt, wife, woman of the world, mother, middle-aged inatron—and
above all, woman as an untiring seeker of the nature of the psychological
processes behind both femininity and masculinity. Love too appears in several
roles such as a 'skin-communicated thing’, an overpowering force, an escape, a
lorging and a hunger resuming in satiety. Kamala Das's generally sex-dominated
poetry has unfortunately obscured her few but sensitive poems which evoke
childhood memories of the ancestral home in Kerala.

Many of Kamala Das’s love poems have a Browningesque dramatic quality.

Like Browning’s women, her persona too sees herself in different situations
against a concrete background, reacting to ‘incidents in the development of the
soul’. The intensity of her utterance sometimes results in a lack of verbal
discipline, and her constant harping upon sex cannot escape the law of
diminishing aesthetic returns. She has her moments of romantic claptrap and
sentimentality also (e.g., ‘O Krishna, I am melting, melting, melting’), but the
total impression Kamala Das’s poetry produces is one of a bold, ruthless honesty
tearing passionately at conventional attitudes to reveal the quintessential woman
within.

While there are more than thirty modern women poets with more than one
collection each to their credit, the work of few of them possesses the
individuality and power of Kamala Das’s verse. Monika Varma’s (1916—) six
volumes including Dragonflies Draw Flame (1962), Past Imperative (1972) and
Alakananda (1976) often reveal an acute responsiveness to nature, but she
succumbs too easily to poetizing, and her sense of diction is sometimes so
unsure that she writes a line like ’bivouac of bulrushes bordering the brackish
pool’. Gauri Deshpande’s (1942—) three collections—Between Births (1968),
Lost Love (1970) andBeyond The Slaughter-house (1972) show a similar
sensitiveness to the changing moods of nature, while some of her love poems
recreate the drama of man-woman relationship as evocatively as Kamala Das
though on a much more limited scale and in a less challenging manner. Some of
her lyrics are, however, marred by tear-mongering (i.e., ‘If only I’d die’). Mamta
Kalia’s (1942—) verse in Tribute to Papa (1970) and Poems (1978), on the other
hand, has a refreshingly astringent quality. She can talk about love, marriage,
family life and society with irony and wit (e.g. ‘Give up all hope/Ye that enter
the kingdom of Government service’), but she has not been able to sustain this
mode effectively enough. Suniti Namjoshi’s (1941—) is a talent in a similar
mould. Her books include Poems (1967), Cyclone in Pakistan (1971) and The
Jackass and the Lady (1980). Her poem, ‘Benefits’ echoes Sarojini Naidu’s ‘If
you call me I will come’ and wryly adds,‘Together we’ll make/Many bastards.’
In her Myth in a Metal Mirror (n.d.) Tilottama Rajan cleverly experiments with
both verse inspired by painting and modern sculpture and typographical effects,
without however achieving much cogent poetic communication.

Among women poets who have published more than one volume each (mostly
under the Writers Workshop imprint) are Meena Alexander (The Bird's Bright
Wing; Without Place); Roshen Alkazi (Seventeen Poems; Seventeen More
Poems); Margaret Chatterjee (The Sandalwood Tree; Toward the Sun); Mary
Ann Dasgupta (The Peacock Smiles; The Circus of Love)', Leela Dharmaraj
(Selected Poems, Slum Silhouette)-, Ketaki Kushari Dyson (Sap-wood; Hibiscus
in the North); Lakshmi Kannan (The Glow and the Grey; Impressions); Anna
Sujatha Modayil (Crucifixions; We the Unreconciled); Gauri Pant (Weeping
Season; Staircase 17);Lila Ray (Entrance; The Flowering Heart); Lalitha
Venkateswaran (Declarations; Tree-Bird); Indira Devi Dhanrajgir (The Yearning
and other Poems, Partings in Mimosa), and Sunita Jain (Man of My Desires,
Beneath the Frost).

Notable among those with a single collection each so far are Mary Erulkar
(Mandala 25); Ira De (The Hunt and Other Poems); Tapati Mookerji (The
Golden Road to Samarkand); Malathi Rao (Khajuraho and Other Poems),
Bhanumathi Srinivasan (C— Flat) and Eunice de Souza (Fix).

The number of minor poetic voices among the men is even larger. The more
prolific of those published by the Writers Workshop are: Lawrence Bantleman
(Kanchanjanga; New Poems); Deb Kumar Das (The Winter Bird Walks,
Through a Glass Darkly); Brooks Frederick (Rocket to the Moon; Frank Sinatra
Sing To Me Again); Paul Jacobs (Sonnets; Swedish Exercises);Ruskin Bond (It
Isn’t Time That’s Passing; Lone Fox Dancing); Rakshat Puri (Poems; Nineteen
Poems); S.C. Saha (The Unseen Bird; The Other Side); S. Santhi (Lamplight in
the Sun; Whispers

Near a Niagara); S. Mokashi-Punekar (The Captive; The Pretender); K.D.

Katrak (A Journal of the way; Diversions by the Wayside); M.K. Kaw (An Oasis
of Solitude in a Sahara; Look Closely at Om) Sukanta Chaudhuri (Poems, The
Glass King) and Srinivas Rayaprol (Bones and Distances; Married Love). Suresh
Kohli, whose Devil's Epicure (1969) appeared under the Writers Workshop
imprint has also published Target for a Kiss (1972).

Those with a solitary collection each against their names sc far include, among
very many others, R de L Furtado (The Oleanders); K. Raghavendra Rao
(Poems); M.R. Bhagwan (Poems); M.P. Bhaskaran (The Dancer and the Ring);
Stanley F. Rajiva (The Permanent Element), Michael Daniels (Split in Two),
Dhruvakumar Joshi (Ash-Flowers: Poems 1970-1976) and Vilas Sarang (A Kind
of Silence).

Poets whose work has mostly appeared independently of the Writers Workshop
are fewer in number. Among these are Keshav Malik (Rippled Shadow, Storm
Warning); Satya Dev Jaggi (Homewards; The Moon Voyagers and Other
Poems)', Syed Ameeruddin (What the Himalaya Said', Bells of Reminiscences)',
R. Rabindranath Menon (Straws in the wind; Shadows in the Sun) T.V.
Dattatreyan (Silver Box, Mail Box and Other Poems), Karan Singh (Welcome,
the Moonrise) O.P. Bhagat (Another Planet), Dilip Chitre (Travelling in a Cage),
O.P. Bhatnagar (Feeling Fossils, Angles of Retreat) and I.K. Sharma (The
Shifting Sand Dunes). G.S. Sharat Chandra's April in Nanjangud and Once or
Twice have both appeared abroad; his first collection,Bharata Natyam Dancer
and Other Poems (1966) was published in India.

The fecundity of post-Independence Indian English poetry is thus amazing, but

the quality of its minor verse does not match its abundance of output. A large
part of the verse written during recent years is merely clever and frequently
offers only slick verbal concoctions in the putative modernist style which is no
more authentic than the imitative romanticism of the earlier periods. Surprisingly
enough, in spite of their professed modernity, some of these versifiers are seen
unashamedly ‘bleeding barren tears’. There are others who are banal only in a
contemporary way. Freed from the restraints of metre, rhyme and form (which
their predecessors were compelled to obey) they seem to disregard the inevitable
compulsions of rhythm, intelligibility and sometimes even grammar. Fortunately
from this versified chaos the work of more than a dozen poets stands out by
virtue of its unmistakable authenticity, significance and power.
Fiction
The Novel

Post-Independence Indian English fiction retains the momentum the novel had
gained during the Gandhian age. The tradition of social realism established
earlier on a sound footing by Mulk Raj Anand is continued by novelists like
Bhabani Bhat- tacharya, Manohar Malgonkar and Khushwant Singh, who made
their appearance during the nineteen fifties and the early ’sixties; while the
experimental novel with a specific Indian orientation of which Raja Rao’s
Kanthapura was an early example also flourishes, though with inevitable
individual variations, in the hands of Sudhin Ghose, G.V. Desani and M.
Ananta- narayanan. And the fiction of B. Rajan illustrates the strains of both
realism and fantasy. A notable development is the emergence of an entire school
of women novelists among whom the leading figures are Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,
Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal and Anita Desai. By the end of the
’sixties and in the early ’seventies newer voices are heard, the most striking of
them being Arun Joshi anjl Chaman Nahal.

The earliest of the social realists of the period is Bhabani Bhattacharya (1906—),
a novelist strongly influenced by Tagore and Gandhi, while both his fictional
theory and practice show his affinity with Anand. Bhattacharya believes that
‘Art must teach, but unobtrusively, by its vivid interpretation of life. Art must
preach, but only by virtue of its being a vehicle of truth. If that is propaganda,
there is no need to eschew the word.’1® He is convinced that ‘a novel must have
a social purpose. It must place before the reader something from the society’s
point of view.’10 While each of Bhattacharya’s novels has an unmistakable
social purpose, only occasionally does he succeed in achieving a ‘vivid
interpretation’ of life, his chief weaknesses being a tendency to rest content with
presenting too neat aod machine-made contrasts and to settle for easy romantic
solutions.

Bhattacharya’s first novel, So Many Hungers (1947), published within a few

months of Independence, is one of his better efforts, though not totally free from
his characteristic weaknesses. Set against the background of the ‘Quit India’
movement and the Bengal famine of the early forties, the novel deals with the
theme of exploitation —political, economic and social. The 'so many hungers*
of the title are those for political freedom (in the case of India); for imperial
expansion (in the case of the axis powers); for money (in the case of the
capitalists who create an artificial food scarcity by hoarding rice), for food (in
the case of the starved Bengali poor); for sex (in the particular case of the sex-
starved soldier who rapes the destitute rustic girl Kajoli and in general, of those
who frequent the Calcutta brothels, now unusually well-stocked with needy
starvelings); for human dignity and self-respect (in the case of Kajoli, who
rejects the brothel), and the hunger as a spiritual weapon employed by the
freedom-lighters who go on a hunger strike in jail, ‘Devata’ even undertaking a
fast unto death. Of these several hungers, the novelist has succeeded best in
dealing with the hunger for food, and the scenes depicting the havoc wrought by
the famine among the rural poor in Bengal constitute some of the finest
examples of social realism in Indian English fiction. However, Bhattacharya,
like Anand, is sometimes tempted to indulge in gratuitous authorial comment;
and the final solution to Kajoli’s problem appears to be totally unrealistic. She
decides to earn her living, not by bartering her body but by selling newspapers—
as if a young and defenceless girl could ply the latter trade in the concrete jungle
of Calcutta without being forced into the former, sooner or later. The other major
characters in the novel—Samarendra', the capitalist; his father, ‘Devata’, a
Gandhian figure; and young Rahoul, the patriotic scientist—remain consistently
onedimensional figures, thus reducing the total effect of the depiction of the
other ‘hungers’.

Music for Mohini (1952) moves on two levels. On the personal level, it is the
story of Mohini, a ‘city-bred, village-wed girl’and her adjustment to her new
life-style. On the social plane, the narrative presents an attempt to ‘connect
culture with culture. . .Our old Eastern view of life with the new semiwestern
outlook’—an attempt to wed the ‘horoscope’ with the ‘microscope’. The
narrative suffers on both the levels owing to a confused and superficial
presentation of the issues involved, and hence the novel fails both as a domestic
drama of marital adjustment and a cultural statement of the East-West encounter.
Mohini’s husband, Jayadevts sought to be presented as a happy combination of
the best of the Indian tradition and western thought, but remains a shadowy
figure. The vivid realism of the scenes depicting the Hindu marriage at its
various stages beginning with the ‘bride-showing’ is characteristic of the author,
but the ‘music’ of the title ultimately turns out to be the commonplace strains of
an organ-grinder.

In He Who Rides a Tiger (1952)—easily Bhattacharya’s finest novel—many

serious questions are posed through an absorbing narrative of ironic reversal. ‘A
wail from the bowels of Bengal* like So Many Hungers, the novel tells the story
of Kalo, a poor blacksmith, who, jailed for stealing a bunch of bananas (the
magistrate’s question to him is, ‘Why did you have to live?’) vows revenge on
society. He poses as a holy brahmin, who has been vouchsafed the miraculous
vision of a Siva idol, and thrives on the fraud, until he discovers the age-old truth
that he cannot dismount the tiger of his own creation without ruining himself;
but dismount he must, in the interest of mental peace. There is an intricate criss-
cross of themes here such as appearance and reality, the haves and the have-nots,
and religious hypocrisy. The thematic similarity with Narayan’s The Guide is
plain, though in contrast to Narayan’s unsullied realism, Bhattacharya allows
himself a romantic touch in the final scene of the exposure where the crowd
spontaneously supports Kalo (one wonders whether the superstitious mob wasn’t
more likely to condemn him for sacrilege). He is also tempted to make Kalo his
mouthpiece at times, but the narrative, moving at a tiger’s pace, flosses over
many such flaws.

This is exactly what fails to happen in A Goddess Named Gold (1960), a slow-
moving allegorical exercise, in which a fake magic talisman raises great
expectations which are finally frustrated. The demands of the crudely presented
parable have also hamstrung Bhattacharya’s talent for realism here.

Shadow From Ladakh (1966), which won the Sahitya Aka- demi award in 1967,
appears to fail for a different reason. The presentation of a surface contrast
between two ideologies here is further marred by that age-old romantic device of
the daughter of one adversary duly falling in love with the other. A topical novel
set against the background of the Chinese invasion of 1962,Shadow From
Ladakh contrasts the Gandhism of Satyajit Sen of Gandhigram with the
scientism of Bhashkar, Chief Engineer of Steeltown. The two girls in Bhashkar’s
life—Satyajit’s daughter, Suraita, and Rupa, the half-western girl—are
compared to the spinning wheel and the turbine respectively. The narrative,
which ends with a dubious compromise (Steel- town will postpone its take-over
of Gandhigram) can hardly be stated to have done justice to its avowed theme.

In A Dream in Hawaii (1978), Bhattacharya returns to the theme of East-West

encounter, this time in Hawaii, ‘no better meeting ground of East and West.’ The
encounter is abortive, because while the East with all its spirituality has not yet
completely mastered the flesh, the West continues to remain commercialised and
confused. Swami Yogananda, who discovers in the end that he has not still risen
above his love for Debjani represents the East; and the two Americans—Dr.
Swift, the organizational man, who wants to use Yogananda as a tool in
founding a flourishing spiritual centre, and Dr. Gregson, the champion of the
permissive society—are intended to reveal two facets of modern American
culture. It is certainly heartening to And Bhattacharya resisting the temptation to
accept a readymade solution at the end, though the Americans in the novel
appear to be uniformly ‘flat* characters.

Bhattacharya’s Action has been translated into more than a dozen European
languages. His sense of situation and mastery of the narrative mode, the realism
of his locale, his judicious use of Indianisms (never overdone as in the case of
Anand) and his easily identiAable character types have perhaps created a picture
of India which Ats in admirably with pre-conceived foreign notions about this
country. It is however, a moot point whether except in So Many Hungers and He
Who Rides a Tiger, he has created Action which will really endure.

Unlike Bhattacharya, Manohar Malgonkar (1913—) is a realist who believes that

art has no purpose to serve except pure entertainment. ‘I do strive deliberately
and hard to tell a story well,’ he declares; ‘I revel in incident. . . I feel a special
allegiance to the particular sub caste among those whose caste- mark I have
affected, the entertainers, the tellers of stories.’17 While in Bhattacharya’s
Action, women characters, on the whole, come to life better than the men,
Malgonkar’s is a male

dominated world in which women seem to be little more than instruments of

masculine pleasure. Malgonkar's novels are neatly constructed and entertainingly
told narratives which, however, present a rather limited view of life and human
nature seen through the eyes of a hard-boiled man of the world for whom there is
little to admire and respect in human nature—a man for whom love is mostly
equated with sex and the flesh and its appetites are more real than the finer
perceptions of the mind and the heart and the larger concerns of human life. His
flat, cliche-ridden style serves his simple artistic needs admirably. It is only
when he adopts a broader view of things as in The Princes that he is able to rise
above his self-imposed restrictions.

A retired Indian army officer, Malgonkar began his novelis- tic'career with
Distant Drum (i960); a story of army life with a wealth of engaging detail—an
area in which apart from Anand’s Across the Black Waters, Indian English
fiction is singularly poor. Malgonkar’s hero, Kiran, is a somewhat idealized
picture of a young, pre-Independence army officer, brave, spirited and with just
the right amount of rebelliousness in his make-up which enables him to cut a
dash without incurring very serious consequences. Kiran sows his wild oats as a
young soldier is obviously expected to, before he marries Bina, much against the
wishes of her father.

The title and the epigraph af Combat of Shadows (1962) are from the Bhagavad
Gita: ‘Desire and aversion are opposite shadows. Those who allow themselves to
be overcome by their struggle cannot rise to a knowledge of reality.’ The moral
issues indicated here are, however, nowhere in evidence in the action and the
characters in the novel. The story centres round Henry Winton, the young British
Manager of an Assam Tea Garden, a weak and self-centred man convinced early
in life of the advantages that accrue ‘if you eased upon your sense of values.’ He
is morally responsible for the death of an Indian Shikari and also engineers the
death of a Eurasian who is having an affair, with his wife (to complicate matters,
Winton himself has had an affair with the girl the Eurasian loves) and ultimately
pays for both these deaths with his own life. The narrative makes it abundantly
clear that the ethical questions involved are far less important to the novelist than
the exigencies of a fast-moving tale with a picturesque finale. Malgonkar’s
picture of the British officials, the Eurasians and the labourers on the Tea estate
shows him adopting a totally ‘pucka sahib’ attitude reminiscent of Kipling and
John Masters.

The Princes (1963) is indubitably Malgonkar’s best novel, since here, for once,
he goes beyond his self-avowed role as a story-teller. His grandfather was a
minister in a princely state and hence, Malgonkar’s involvement with what he
deals with in the novel was perhaps deeper than what the demands of a merely
readable story would require. The result is a memorable picture of the troubled
times of the merger of the princely states into the Indian Union, with special
reference to the small state of Begwad. The narrator is Abhayraj, the Crown
Prince of Begwad, an insider-outsider, who views the entire merger drama as
both actor and spectator. As a youth firmly rooted in the age-old aristocratic
tradition and yet aware of the new democratic values, he is an admirable foil to
his father, the Maharaja who is a perfect representative of the feudal order. The
sympathies of Abhayraj and the author are obviously with the feudal past
(Malgonkar’s pucka sahib stance remains unaltered) and hence the new
democratic order is certainly not fairly represented by the vengeful and cowardly
Karamchand, the untouchable boy, who becomes a minister. While this
manifestly limits the objectivity of the picture, Malgonkar's depiction of the
feudal way of life is scrupulously fair. He reveals both its strength and its
limitations. Its representative, Maharaja Hiroji, is a manly man, who calmly
courts death when all is lost; at the same time he has all the vices of his class and
he is clearly made out to be an anachronism in the modern world. Malgon- kar
tells his story entertainingly as usual, but his (unconscious?) awareness of the
issues at stake gives his narrative a larger dimension, and makes it a successful
political novel.

This transformation fails to occur in A Bend in the Ganges (1964), an ambitious

novel the setting for which is Partition. The title and the epigraph are drawn
from the Ramayana: ‘At a bend in the Ganges, they paused to take a look at the
land they were leaving’; but as in Combat of Shadows, the serious thematic
overtones in the original are completely smothered in a narrative of brutal
violence in which it is difficult to sympathize with any single major character—
whether Gian the shifty Gandhian youth or Debi-dayal, the superior terrorist or
Shah the Muslim fanatic or the young but cynical Sundari, whose idea of love is
that it'was a game-a game strictly for grown-ups so that if you were not
sufficiently skilful, you could be broken by it.’ Sundari’s sour assertion,
however, does not prevent the author from packing her off with Gian, whom she
has humiliated, to safety (and presumably to marriage) at the end. Malgonkar
works on a large canvas; the scene shifts from India to the Andamans and back
and the racy narrative is full of exciting action. The upshot, however, is not an
epic novel, but, melodrama, because the novelist’s vision is hopelessly
circumscribed by his inability to look beyond the sheer horror and brutality of it
all.

This same lack of a larger vision makes Malgonkar rest content with working on
the superficial level of telling an exciting romantic tale in The Devil's Wind
(1972), while his material clamoured in vain for the shaping power of the
historical imagination. In this novel dealing with the great Revolt of 1857,
Malgonkar claims to have told ‘Nana’s story as I believe he might have written it
himself.’ Early in the narrative, Nana observes,‘For me the issues were not
altogether clear cut, I could not, in my own mind, separate the national struggle
from personal involvements.’ The novelist, however, appears to be far more
interested in Nana’s 'personal involvements’ than in the ‘national struggle’. This
is clear from the fact that both Tantya Topi and Mani (Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi)
who played roles in the national struggle remain pale sketches. Nana himself is
little more than a shadowy figure—the inevitable fate of the autobiographical
narrator in fiction. Malgonkar’s use of mutilated anglicized forms of names like
‘Tantya’ (for ‘Tatya’) and ‘Dhondu Pant’ (for ‘Dhondo Pant’) can only be
explained by his pucka sahib proclivities (or, is it his eye on the Western
reader?) since as a Marathi-speaking author he must be familiar with the correct
forms.

Apart from the novels Malgonkar, a professional writer, has also written a
competent espionage thriller, Spy in Amber (1971) and two novelizations of him
scripts—Shalimar and Open Season.

The realism of Khushwant Singh (1918—) is of an earthier variety. He has

declared that his ‘roots are in the dunghill of a tiny Indian village’18 and his
fiction reeks with the odour of his roots. One of his characters says, ‘It was not
possible to keep Indians off the subject of sex for long. It obsessed their
minds.’19 Whatever the measure of truth in this generalization, it is certainly
valid in the case of this novelist. Khushwant Singh also appears to take a
markedly irreverent view of Indian life and character. His style, haid and
vigorous, employs colourful Punjabi expletives and terms of abuse a la Anand
while his irony is honed like a Sikh sword.

Khushwant Singh’s first novel, Train to Pakistan (1956) (Mono Majra in the
American edition, 1956) illustrates all these features of his art. The impact of
Partition on a small village on the Indo-Pakistan border is shown here with
pitiless realism of description and the swift tempo of the narrative carries the
reader along. The integrity of the novel is however flawed in two ways: the only
role that Iqbal, the Communist who comes to the viltage for party work, seems to
play is that of acting as the mouthpiece of the author; and there is also the
conventionally romantic motif of the love of Jugga, the Sikh village gangster, for
(of course) a Muslim girl, in saving whom he duly sacrifices his life.

I shall Not Hear the Nightingale (1959) has a greater authenticity, though the
crudity persists. The novel presents an ironic picture of a Sikh joint family
illustrative of different Indian reactions to the freedom movement of the ’forties,
including double-dealing, posing and treachery. In Buta Singh, the magistrate,
the novelist has mercilessly pilloried Indian officialdom. Khushwant Singh’s
obsession with sex results in exercises in copulation involving major characters
as well as minor in practically every chapter. The only character that wins our
respect is the old mother Sabhrai who has ‘the dignity of an ancient people
behind her.’ The novel derives its title from her reply to her son’s assurance that
after Independence, ‘once more the Nightingales will sing.’ She says, ‘I shall not
hear the Nightingale’—a sentiment in tune with the temper of the novel.
The realism of S. Menon Marath (1906—) is as securely rooted in the soil of his
native Kerala, as Khushwant Singh’s is in that of the Punjab; but it is manifestly
far more refined in presentation. His Wound of Spring (1960) describes the
disintegration of a traditional matriarchal Nayar family in Kerala during the
second decade of the twentieth century. There is also an ironical picture -of the
Gandhian movement here. At the bonfire of foreign-made clothes, beggars
clamour: ‘Don’t burn them, give them to us’; and students welcome the agita-
tation because ‘the undone home work would not humiliate today, at any rate.’
The Moplah rebellion of 1921 also shapes the events in the narrative. The Sale
of an Island (1968) is a slighter work, depicting the conflict between Kumaran,
who returns from the War to find the island on which his house has been built
sold, and the rich landlord, Sekhara Menon. It ends with the eviction of all the
tenants and the death of Kumaran. A theme with considerable social and tragic
potential is handled here in a rather superficial manner.

Balachandra Rajan (1920—) illustrates both the strains prominent in Indian

English fiction of the ’fifties and the ’sixties— viz., realism and fantasy. Unlike
his contemporaries, however, his realism is less social than psychological in his
first novel, The Dark Dancer (1959). In this story of Krishnan, a south Indian
youth who, on his return from England to post-Partition India, finds himself torn
between his love for the British Cynthia and his loyalty to Kamala his wife, the
novelist’s intention appears to be to pose the problem of East-West confrontation
in terms of the protagonist’s quest for identity. Unfortunately, both motive and
action are almost lost in the haze which Rajan’s donnish style, chokeful of
literary echoes and allusions and straining after subtleties of thoughts frequently
left half- said and unsaid, throws over the narrative. In this haze, unlike what
happens in A Bend in the Ganges and Train to Pakistan, even the violence of the
Partition holocaust takes on a curiously unreal air. The ‘Dark Dancer’ of the title
—Shiva, the god of both destruction and creation—therefore remains only an
item of colourful stage property and fails to become a powerful symbol
incorporated into the fictional world of the narrative.

Rajan’s second novel, Too Long in the West (1961) is in a totally different key
altogether. This is a comic extravaganza in which the central figure is Nalini, a
South Indian girl, who returns from an American University to face the problem
of choosing a suitable husband. An advertisement for a bridegroom declaring
that ‘unprecedented paragon will marry whoever deserves her’.brings various
suitors—almost everyone of them an eccentric in his own right-on the scene,
while Nalini’s parents and the rustics of her village contribute their own quota of
comedy to the proceedings. In addition to this parody of the ancient Hindu
practice of swayamvara (i.e. bridegroom- choosing), Nalini’s sojourn in the
United States is also described with engaging irony. The breezy, facetious style
harmonizes admirably with the tone of the narrative. Unfortunately, Rajan has
not exploited this vein any further and has not in fact written any more fiction
after this.

The novels of Sudhindra Nath Ghose (1899-1965) are an exciting experiment in

the expression of the Indian ethos in a form firmly grounded in the ancient native
tradition of storytelling. They have, however, suffered from a strange neglect
until recently, owing to various reasons noted by Shyamala A. Narayan20. Apart
from the fact that the novels, published in England, have long been out of print,
they have been mistaken for memoirs (A Times Literary Supplement reviewer
regarded them as such; theNational Bibliography of Indian Literature (1962) lists
them as ‘autobiographical sketches' and the National Library, Calcutta houses
them in the Biography Section). The four novels— And Gazelles Leaping
(1949), Cradte of the Clouds (1951) The Vermilion Boat (1953) and The Flame
of the Forest (1955)—form a tetralogy knit together by the central figure of the
protagonistnarrator, about twenty years of whose life and career they cover. The
nameless narrator (called ‘Balaram’ at places, because he was born on the
anniversary of the birth of the legendary Balarama of the plough) is an orphan,
though born in a rich family and is brought up by a village aunt. The

tetralogy is actually a bildungsroman and its central theme is the growth of the
narrator’s mind, which is shaped both by his boyhood years in a traditional rural
community and his youthful experiences in the city of Calcutta. The two forces
that impinge upon his mind right from the beginning are faith and the awareness
of evil, and each novel shows his mental development under their impact. The
first novel of the tetralogy is a delightful idyll of childhood in a kindergarten
housed in a small village on the outskirts of Calcutta. Here the narrator, as a
child, ibefriends Mohan, a shy, dwarfish elephant with a strong inferiority
complex, and imbibes from this experience the typical Hindu belief in the sense
of oneness of all life, including man and animal. His first encounter with evil
also takes place here when a gang of hooligans descends on the village, beats
him up and threatens to injure Mohan. His refusal to be cowed down by them
constitutes another significant stage in the education of his soul. In Cradle of the
Clouds, the narrator’s boyhood in a small Santal village is described. The happy
camaraderie and tolerance of the villagers and their simple and yet devout faith
influence the boy strongly. He takes this traditional faith on trust as when he
participates as Balarama in the ritualistic ploughing ceremony organized during
a severe drought. Evil appears here in the form of intolerant and sceptical
rationalism, represented by the Second Master who vainly tries to interrupt the
ritual.

The Vermilion Boat shows the narrator first as a University student and then a
job-seeker in Calcutta, which worships ‘corruption and the Bitch-Goddess’. The
young man is now fully exposed to human nature in the raw, and sees through
the treachery of his guardian Jogin-Da and the fake faith of the pseudo- sadhu,
Prem Swami and has a taste of communal riots also. There is the inevitable
sexual awakening too, but his affair with Roma reveals to him only the baser
face of physical love. On the other hand, his deeply ingrained sense of the
oneness of all life makes him befriend a porpoise which saves him from a watery
grave, when his vermilion boat disintegrates in a storm and the legend of Manasa
—the snake goddess, who dwells in the ocean—- brings home to him the
significance of the Feminine Principle

as the saviour.

The narrator continues to live in Calcutta in the last part of the tetralogy, The
Flame of the Forest, illustrating the truth of his verdict on the city: ‘Living in any
city is risky, whereas in Calcutta it is positively dangerous.’ His encounters with
the American journal, Life-in-Technikolor: Foni Dhar, the mercenary academic
who makes a fortune out of a worthless textbook and recommends for a
doctorate a bogus thesis on a non-existent writer and ‘Ek Number’, the corrupt
politician, are productive of much sardonic humour. Here again, as in the earlier
novels, one of his best friends is from the animal kingdom—Pi ram, the bulldog.
In the end, the narrator, wanting to escape from the clutches of ‘Ek Number’
joins Myna, ‘The Flame of the Forest’— a devotional singer in her pilgrimage.
He has at last encountered real, mature faith here, but there is a clear suggestion
that armed with it, he will return to the world to fight evil, having only ‘decided
rather to bide my time for hitting back, and reminded myself of the Penhari
saying: “Like a heron be, when ’tis your time for lying low:/like a heron be when
'tis your turn to strike the blow.” ’

The fictional ‘ I’ of the narrator is the only concession that Ghose makes to the
western fictional form. In virtually all other respects, his model is the oriental
tale. Like his original, he makes no distinction between this world and the other,
both to him being equally real. Hence, he tells the story of the South Indian
village, which, cursed by a holy man, floated in the air to land in the North with
as much conviction as he evinces in talking about the corruption in Calcutta.
Likewise, the human and the animal worlds too do not remain separate. An
elephant, a fish and a dog feel, think and act like human beings (Mohan, the
elephant, reads the notice ‘No Elephants’ and starts crying). Furthermore, the
characters are often presented more as archetypes21than,as complex individuals,
and carry symbolic overtones. Thus, the nameless, disinherited and orphaned
protagonist is himself an apt representative of the modern man who has gained
the West only to lose the East, and whose education should therefore comprise a
recovery of his lost heritage. The names of many other characters are also
suggestive, recalling those in thePancatantra like ‘Immortal-Power’, the King,
‘Increase’, the Merchant and ‘Princess Lovely’. Some of them are
personifications of qualities or status such as Ramoni (beautiful woman), Gama
(Champion wrestler) and Ek Number (Number one), the leading politician who
recalls the swollen- headed King Nahusha of old. Others are ironical nicknames
typical of personal activities like Comrade Dynamiter, the Communist and Kolej
Huzoor, the boastful collegian. And some others are known simply by their
calling, like Kathak (story teller), Kumar (Kumbhakar—i.e. potter) etc.

Ghose’s narrative technique also shows him discarding the Aristotelian concept
of plot and employing the ancient Sanskrit device of the framing story
interpolated with inserted tales told by oifferent characters. These tales are from
diverse sources such as the ancient epics and puranas, legend and folk-lore, and
even history. In addition to Indra and Krishna, the Buddha and Vikramaditya
also figure here along with Emperors Akbar and Jehangir. There are Sadhus and
Fakirs, goddesses and evil spirits like the Nishir Dak, and falcons and tigers too.
Most of the tales are illustrative of some point made in a discussion between the
characters, and are thus something more than mere digressions. Following the
practice of the Sanskrit Campu Kavya Ghose mixes prose and verse and
introduces into the narrative songs in Bengali with musical notations. There are
long descriptions of the beauty of Nature in lyrical prose a la the puranas, and
the frequent use of proverbs and sententious sayings is reminiscent of the
Pancatantra and similar didactic tales.

While Ghose has undoubtedly registered remarkable success in his experiment,

it is obvious that his achievement does not match that of Raja Rao. Unlike the
author of The Serpent and the Rope, Ghose does not try to probe into the
profound philosophical implications of the tradition to which he also returns.'
The very fact that his protagonist in the first two novels is a boy and a callow
youth in the next two has naturally circumscribed his vision. But within his self-
imposed limits he has produced fiction which has unmistakable authenticity,
freshness and charm.

G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1948; revised edition 1972) is easily one of
the most daringly experimental novels in Indian English literature. Govindas
Visbnoodas Desani (1909—) ran away from home at the age of eighteen and
spent the next twentyfive years in England, working as a newspaper
correspondent, popular lecturer and broadcaster. Returning to India in 1952, he
spent several years in seclusion, practising yoga and studying Buddhism. Since
1968, he has been teaching philosophy in an American University. All About H.
Hatterr is a novel extremely complex both in theme and technique. It is at once a
diverting autobiography (‘autobiographical’ as Hatterr

calls it in his own peculiar brand of English) of a Eurasian, who is as avid for
experience as he is incapable of learning from it; the story of the hero’s spiritual
quest for understanding the meaning of life; a social chronicle revealing aspects
of White, Eurasian and Indian character; an uproariously funny comedy— a
‘human horseplay’, brimful of various kinds of humour ranging from sheer farce
to subtle wit; a triumphant experiment in blending Western and Indian narrative
forms, and an astonishing exhibition of a seemingly unlimited stylistic virtuosity.

‘Hindustaniwalla Hatterr’ is the pseudonym of a fifty-five year old, orphaned

son of a European seaman and a non- Christian woman from Malaya. The name,
‘Hatterr’ suggests both a ‘sahib’ (i.e. ‘topiwallah’, the man with the ‘sola topi*,
the badge of the colonial European in pre-Independence Asian countries; in fact,
the hero himself tells us that the name Hatterr wis suggested by his headmaster’s
‘too large for him hat’) and the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland (it is
significant to note that Hatterr has had a head-injury in boyhood and is warned
that he might develop mental-disorder). He is a tragi-comic character, who
elicits both our pity and ridicule. A rootless orphan, he is a lifelong prey to a
nagging sense of insecurity. He tells us, T haven’t had my mother to love me... I
have no relations ... I am afraid, can’t you see?’ We are told that he carries in his
pocket fifty doctors’ telephone numbers, in case of accident. He is also a
simpleton, who is fooled by the seven oriental sages whom he approaches
reverentially; fleeced by a loan-shark in Mysore, and suffers time and again 227

at the hands of women, including a circus-manager's wife and a washer-woman.

Hatterr, however, is not merely the eternal gull; he is also Man in search of a
viable philosophy of living. Desani himself has said, ‘In my All About H.
Hatterr, I have systematically concerned myself with the British (Western) aims
and means of achieving status and respectability. I have also, as definitely, dealt
with the Indian (eastern) aims and means of achieving status and respectability,
not forgetting the hereafter .... Hatterr, having consorted with both, ended by
jeering at both and their sources. He had to form a view of sorts for himself. And
his view was to accept all situations, events, creatures, including the devil, as
well within God’s laws, and get on with the business of living.’ At the end of his
tragicomic Odyssey, we find Hatterr declaring, ‘I am not fed up with Life. ... I
carry on. . . . Carry on, boys, and continue like hell.’

The White members of the club from which Hatterr is expelled, the cockney
circus impressario, Bill Smyth and his wife Rosie, and the exclusive Mrs. Hatterr
are slight sketches but Hatterr’s close friend, Banerrji is perhaps the most
memorable portrait of the ‘Babu’ in Indian English fiction. A typical Anglophile,
he wishes he could change his name from ‘Nath’ to ‘Noel’. A minor poet who
has composed in ‘Heptastich and Ostastich’, he is a pedant who specializes in
knowing recondite facts like how‘in about the year 1639, in Holland, as much as
4,203 guilders were paid for a single tulip.’ A great admirer of Shakespeare, he
always quotes the Bard mostly in a wrong context, while his bookish and stilted
English is typical of his class.

Humour of character is only part of the intricate comic design of the novel.
There are comic situations galore here, like Hatterr, asked to take off all that he
wears by the Sage of the Wilderness, doing a Red Indian War dance round the
pile of clothes dressed only in a towel marked ‘G.I.P. Railway’; and Hatterr as
the would-be lion-tamer, fainting in the lion’s cage and dreaming of an operation
theatre with millions of bottles labelled ‘Pearls Before Swine’, a surgeon who
tears off his mask at the operation table, revealing himself to be a lion, and a
nurse reciting from Tagore. But it is in the apparently inexhaustible linguistic
humour that we see Desani at his most characteristic. His ‘husbandry of words is
unfathomable,’ almost surpassing James Joyce inFinnegans Wake. The verbal
pyrotechnics in the novel include parody of numerous types of style including
Babu English, Oriental flowery style, cockney speech, commercial English,
medical, legal and nautical terminology; outrageous puns and word-play
involving half a dozen languages; twisted translations, deliberate Malapropisms;
mixed metaphors, folksy parallels, comic analogies, funny proper names,
misapplied allusions and jokes of all kinds.
This apparent verbal chaos is, however, carefully controlled and harnessed to the
needs of a skilfully structured narrative, which the author himself has
characterized as a ‘gesture’. Of the hero’s disastrous encounters, the first
illustrates the general theme of the contrast between appearance and reality; in
two each (Nos. II and VI, and III and VII) he is duped and worsted by women
and charlatans respectively; and in the remaining two, his own attempts to
masquerade as a fake sage end disastrously. Equally interesting is the perfect
blending of western and Indian narrative techniques. The autobiographical
narration is typically Western, and so is the surrealistic technique of
characterization in which all the seven sages ultimately resolve themselves into
the Pseudo-sage, and their various disciples into Hatterr himself, of whom
Banerrji, is in a sense the alter ego. At the same time, there is so much of the
Pancatantra and the Hltopadesa, the Upanishads and the Puranas in the novei,
while the presentation of each encounter under the three stages called
‘Instruction’, ‘Presumption’ and ‘Life-encounter’ is reminiscent of the structure
of the Nyaya syllogism, the five members of which (hypothesis, reason,
example, applicatidn and conclusion) were reduced to three by the Vedantins.
Both the emboxed technique of story-telling and the emphasis on a viable
philosophy of living in the world recall the Pancatantra in which also appearance
versus reality, deception, and ‘diamond cut diamond’ are recurring themes. The
dialogues between sage and disciple read like a parody of the Upanishads and
the vast range of reference to diverse subjects is a typical Puranic characteristic.

All about H. Hatterr is a difficult novel, which has been much admired and
highly praised but still awaits full and intensive critical analysis. Its place,
however, is evidently unique in Indian English fiction; it is a tour-de-force which
its author himself has not been and perhaps may not be able to repeat.

Both Sudhin Ghose and G.V. Desani tried to blend western and oriental modes
of narration in telling tales with a modern setting. In his The Silver Pilgrimage
(1961), M. Anantanarayanan (1907—) adopts a purely oriental form while
narrating a story set in sixteenth century Ceylon and India. It tells how Prince
Jayasurya of Ceylon, sent on a pilgrimage of Kashi (which is technically a
‘Silver Pilgrimage’ as opposed to the journey to Kailasa—a ‘pilgrimage of
Gold’) with his friend Tilaka, undergoes several adventures, meeting robbers and
scholars, tyrants and sages and even a tree-dwelling demon on the way. The
narrative is punctuated with long dialogues and discourses and digressions. The
model here is obviously Dandin’s Dasakumaracarita (c. sixth century, A.D.), a
picaresque narrative dealing with the adventures of ten princes led by Prince
Rajavahana, son of the exiled king of Magadha. The Silver Pilgrimage is an
interesting pastiche, but merely telling a traditional story in the traditional
manner is a less meaningful experiment than adapting it to the attitudes of the
living present. Only at two places does the novel rise above mere pastiche—first,
when the sage Agastya discourses on the ‘six pleasures of rheumatism’ (a
delightful touch of parody, this) and secondly when the merchant describes the
manners and the literary modes of Renaissance England as seen through
sixteenth century Indian eyes. The Silver Pilgrimage would have been a far more
significant experiment had the author continued in this vein throughout.

Of the novelists of the late sixties and the seventies, the most prominent are
Arun Joshi (1939—) and Chaman Nahal (1927—). Arun Joshi’s recurrent theme
is alienation in its different aspects, and his heroes are intensely self-centred
persons prone to self-pity and escapism. In spite of their weaknesses, they are,
however, genuine seekers who strive to grope towards a purpose in life and self-
fulfilment. In his three novels, Joshi attempts to deal with three facets of the
theme of alienation, in relation to self, the society around and humanity at large,
re- spectively, Sindi Oberoi in The Foreigner (1968) is a born ‘foreigner’—a
man alienated from all humanity. The only son of an Indian father and an
English mother, and born in Kenya, he is orphaned at an early age and grows
into a youth without family ties and without a country. ‘My foreignness lay
within me,’ he confesses. Educated in England and the U.S.A., he sums up his
life as ‘twenty-five years largely wasted in search of wrong things in wrong
places.’ He develops a philosophy of detachment, which is really a mask for his
fear of committing himself, of getting involved too deeply with others. His love
for an American girl, June Blyth ends tragically both for the girl and for his best
friend, Babu, primarily because Sindi (a short form of ‘Surrinder’ which he, with
unconscious irony, transliterates as ‘surrender’) is afraid of marriage and its
demands, ‘of possessing anybody and. . .of being possessed.’ He returns to India
and joins an industrial concern but his rootlessness persists. Finally, when the
numerous employees of his factory face ruin as a result of the exposure of the
fraudulent boss, he discovers his latent humanitarianism, which compels him to
save them by taking over the management. This sudden transformation is
unfortunately neither adequately motivated nor prepared for earlier; the ending
thus appears to be botched up —a weakness not confined to this first novel
alone, though Joshi’s presentation of his hero’s alienation is evocative enough.

The Strange Case of Billy Biswas(1971) presents a protagonist alienated from

the higher middle-class society in which he is born and brought up and in which
he is compelled to live, though he finds in himself an over-powering urge to
march to a different drum altogether. Right from his adolescence Billy has been
conscious of an urkraft—a. ‘a great force—a primitive force’ within himself,
which continues to register its presence time and again. His higher training in
anthropology in the U.S.A. accentuates this consciousness further. After his
return to India, marriage and a secure teaching job in a major University fail to
stifle the nagging, strident primitive voice within, and Billy runs away during an
anthropological survey expedition to join a primitive tribe, where be is soon
accepted as an incarna

tion of a legendary ancient king. The ‘short happy life’ of Billy Biswas ends
when, during an attempt by his near relations to reclaim him, he is shot dead
accidentally by a policeman. Billy’s transformation, unlike Sindi’s, is well-
motivated throughout and the absorbing narrative quickens its pace, leading to
the final, tragic man-hunt. In spite of this, the novel fails to be a major fictional
achievement because it is not, in the final analysis, informed with sufficient
imaginative power to make so unusual a narrative absolutely convincing,
especially in its picture of the tribal society in which Billy finds himself king, its
beliefs and practices, and its apotheosis of the professor.

The most acute kind of alienation is that from self and the victim in The
Apprentice (1974) is Rathor, a minor Government official. The son of a middle
class freedom-fighter, he had been a poet and an athlete in youth and his
ambition had been ‘to be good! Respected! To be of use!’ The imperatives of
making a living however, compel him to be a clerk and the prevailing
atmosphere of corruption and Mam monism in the post-Independence period
soon corrodes his soul. His part in a fraudulent deal involving defective army
supplies which leads to the death of his Brigadier friend in the Sino-Indian war
proves an eye-opener. Rathor’s penance in his quest to regain his pre- lapsarian
innocence however, takes a form more symbolic than practical: he takes to
polishing the shoes of the devotees who visit a tempfe, on his way to his office.
One wonders whether Joshi has not botched up his ending once again, the upshot
being a sudden slackening of artistic control.

Joshi is a novelist seriously interested in existential dilemmas and equally

acutely aware of both the problems of post- Independence Indian society and the
implications of the East-West encounter. He is a skilled narrator and can even
make an entire novel a long monologue (as in The Apprentice) without losing
his hold over the reader's attention. He has the vision and the technique; all he
needs is greater maturity.

Chaman Nahal is a novelist of painful odysseys presented in different contexts.

In his first novel, My True Faces (1973), Kamal Kant, whose wife Malati has
left him, goes in search of her throughout Delhi and its outskirts, but having
found her In the end, realizes that their marriage is broken beyond repair. The
quest motif enables Nahal to hold the narrative line taut and the realism of
scenes like the brothel episode is evocative; but Delhi fails to become a presence
in the novel as Dublin is in Joyce. No foundation has been laid for the temple
episode at the end, which is a glaring example of writing done with one eye on
the Western audience’s stock response to such a motif. The sudden change-over
to the mock-heroic in an entire chapter (No. XIII) also mars the unity of tone.

A zadi (1975), which won the Sahitya Akademi award for the year 1977, is a
much more ambitious undertaking. This account of the migration of Lala Kanshi
Ram, a Sialkot grain merchant and his family to India at the time of the
dismemberment of colonial India into two nations in 1947, is easily one of the
most comprehensive fictional accounts of the Partition holocaust in Indian
English literature. Episodes like the procession of jubilant Muslims in Sialkot
when Partition is announced, the queer parade of naked Hindu women in
Narowal and the immolation of Niranjan Singh stand out by their realism. On the
other hand, the love affair between Arun and a Muslim girl is a hackneyed
romantic touch. (Why must Hindu heroes of Partition novels fall, with
monotonous regularity, in love with

Muslim girls alone?). And in describing with intimate detail the liaison between
Arun and Chandani, the charwoman’s daughter, the author appears to be aiming
at killing with one stone the two birds of sex-interest and social reform. Another
serious flaw is the mixing up of the point of view of the protagonist, Lala Kanshi
Ram and that of Arun, which destroys the unity of impression. As a novel of
migration Azadi is by no means in the same class as The Grapes of Wrath,
though it has its felicities.

Nahal turns to the Indian English novelist’s favourite theme of East-west

encounter in Into Another Dawn (1977) but does not appear to bring either a new
perspective or a freshness of treatment to this subject. His hero, Ravi Sharma
hails from an orthodox Brahmin family from holy Hardwar; goes to the United
States for higher studies and duly falls in love with an American woman, the
unhappy wife of a business executive. They elope, but Ravi discovers that he has
terminal cancer and

returns to Hardwar to die. His death-bed musings, cast in the form of a

retrospective narration can hardly be said to constitute a commentary on two
cultures which is in any way original or marked by subtlety of perception. Both
the central theme and the hero as a Brahmin intellectual invite comparison with
The Serpent and the Rope—a comparison which does little credit to Into
Another Dawn.

In his recent novel, The English Queens (1979), Nahal appears to be trying to do
too many things. In narrating this tale of the love of Rekha, an army officer's
daughter living in a select colony, for a poor musician from an adjoining slum,
Nahal does not seem to be quite clear in his mind whether to present the tale as a
realistic social satire on the anglicized elite or a sheer comic extravaganza or a
supernatural fantasy (the hero is revealed at the end to be a new incarnation of
Vishnu, called Lord Chetanal). Both the satire and the extravaganza have their
moments of success, but the supernatural motif has been very crudely handled,
and in any case, the three ingredients in the novel ultimately fail to form a
‘seamless whole’.

Like the women poets of the post-Independence period, the women novelists too
form a sizable and significant school. The work of the earliest of these writers of
fiction, Ruth Prawer Jhabvata (1927—) raises, as suggested in Chapter I, a
knotty problem for the historian of Indian English literature—viz., whether she
can legitimately be called an Indian English writer. Born of Polish parents in
Germany and educated in England, Ruth Prawer married an Indian and has lived
in India for more than twenty-four years. She herself has declared that she
should not be considered an ‘Indian writer’ but ’as one of those European writers
who have written about India. But an important point of difference between
Jhabvala and prominent Western writers such as Kipling and Forster is that she
has lived in India much longer than they did and with far greater involvement;
and more importantly, her marriage to an Indian gave her access to Indian
society on terms radically different from those in the case of these writers.
Consequently, her best work reveals such inwardness in her picture of certain
segments of Indian social life, that it is difficult not to consider her as an
‘insider’,

who at the same time enjoys the privilege of being an ‘outsider’ in an obvious
sense.
Jhabvala’s eight novels fall into two distinct and evenly matched groups—viz.,
comedies of urban middle class Indian life, especially in undivided Hindu
families and ironic studies of the EastWest encounter. The first group comprises
To Whom She

Will (1955), The Nature of Passion (1956), The Householder (1960) and Get
Ready For Battle (1962); to the second belongEsmond in India (1958), A
Backward Place (1965), A New Dominion (1973) and Heat and Dust (1975).
The two motifs are combined in some of the novels, always with the one
subordinated to the other. For instance, The Householder is primarily a comedy
of middle class Indian life, though the East-West theme appears here in a minor
way in the picture of Hans and the foreign set; on the other hand, in A Backward
Place the focus is manifestly on contrasted western responses to India, while the
picture of Bal and his family is in the nature of counterpoint.

In her treatment of both these motifs, Jhabvala is at her best when she observes
acutely oddities of behaviour and response and brings out with gentle irony and
good-humoured satire the comedy of what she observes. Her art, however,
suffers when she offers instead well-worn types and stock reactions, when her
irony turns acid and her satire borders on cynicism, and when she occasionally
tries unsuccessfully to plunge into the deeper waters of serious emotional
complications.

Nothing much by way of ‘action’ happens in Jhabvala’s novels. A young man

and woman enjoy the illusion of romantic love before accepting a separate
arranged marriage each (To Whom She Will); a successful, patriarchal
businessman is so much attached to his youngest daughter that he is reluctant to
get her married into a rich family, though the match will further his own
business interests; but finally succumbs to the pressure of his family (The Nature
of Passion); A youth, newly married, learns through trial and error the privileges
and pains of becoming a grihastha (The Householder); a businessman, with a
scheme for acquiring land occupied by the poor, who are to be evicted, is
thwarted by his own wife, a social worker from

whoE he is separated (Get Ready For Battle); the marriage between a lazy,
stupid but beautiful Indian girl and a snobbish, colonialminded English
expatriate proves a disaster (EsmonA in India); of three Western Women in
India, one, placid and good-natured, tries without complete success to become a
good Hindu wife; the second, a woman of the worlds finds admirers retreating,
as age advances and the third who had come to India to find ‘the deep truths' is
compelled to hunt for a roof over her head (A Backward Place); another set of
three European girls get caught in the toils of a fake Swami (A New Dominion);
and a young English girt in postIndependence India finds herself unconsciously
repeating, with inevitable variations, patterns of behaviour of her step-
grandmother of the colonial days (Heat and Dust).

The most distinctive feature of Jhabvala’s novels is the subtlety and adroitness
with which she unravels the gossamer threads of intricate human relationships—
especially among the women in the Hindu joint family. She recreates admirably
this drama of cattiness in which conversation is often a veiled battle of polite
affronts, the favourite weapons being innuendoes and insinuations, left-handed
compliments and deadly insults masked as innocuous generalities, while a
chance word is a bomb dropped with devilish accuracy and devastating effect. In
these battles, old scores are settled and new wounds inflicted, all over a pleasant
cup of tea or a glass of cool sherbet.

Jhabvala is thus a laureate of the parlour; but she seems to be out of her depth
when dealing with strong emotional involvements, as in the Olivia story in Heat
and Dust. The author's refusal (or is it inability?) to analyse the nature and the
causes of Olivia’s sudden infatuation for the Nawab robs the novel of all
authenticity and makes it simply a clever exercise in machine- made parallelism.
One also notices that from the mid-sixties onwards, Jhabvala’s irony has-
increasingly been turning sour, while her perceptions appear to be losing their
fineness She has recently declared, ‘I would like to live much more in the West,
going back to India? sometimes but not as much as before. One hopes this will
activate old memories which may help her recapture the charm of her early
fiction, in which she

worked deftly and zestfully on her inch of ivory.

If Jhabvala is an outsider-insider, Karaala Markandaya (Purnaiah Taylor, 1924

—) is an insider-outsider in that she is an expatriate, who has been living in
England for a number of years. Markandaya’s fiction evinces a much broader
range and offers a greater variety of setting, character and effect, though her
quintessential themes are equally few—viz., the East-West encounter, and
woman in different life-roles. The East-West encounter takes two forms—first, a
direct relationship between Indian and British characters; and secondly, the
impact of the modern urban culture brought in by the British rule on traditional
Indian life. Murkandaya’s first novel, Nectar in a Sieve (1954) illustrates all
these preoccupations. The narrator, who is also the central figure, is Rukmani, a
rustic woman. The story of her hard peasant life illustrates the truth of
Coleridge's line, ‘work without hope draws nectar in a sieve.’The vagaries of
nature and the depredations of modern industrialism (in the shape of a tannery)
force Rukmani and her husband to migrate to a city where they are fleeced.
Kennington, the kind-hearted itinerant British doctor and social worker
represents the better side of the West. The novel, a ‘Book of the Month Club’
selection, has been compared toGood Earth by some foreign reviewers. Those
who know their Indian village will, however, not fail to notice how contrived a
picture of rustic life it offers. And when the novelist proceeds to describe the
public naming ceremony of Ira’s child which is born in sin, one is convinced that
Rukmani’s village exists only in the expatriate imagination of her creator.
Surely, no traditional Indian village will allow so permissive a code of sexual
morality. Some Inner Fury (1955) and Possession (1963) concentrate on Indo-
British personal relationships. In the former, the love of Mira for Richard is
denied fruition by the fury of the freedom movement which tears the lovers
apart. The unhappy marriage of Kitsamy, the England-returned Civil servant and
Premala, his traditional Hindu wife, shows another facet of the EastWest
relationship. Since Richard remains a paste-board figure, the novel fails to be a
tragedy of star-crossed love. An even greater air of unreality hangs over
Possession, the story of the clash between Lady Caroline and a Swami for the

'possession' of the soul of Valmiki, the rustic artist, who is lured to England by
her, but later returns to his mentor. Since the Swami is so obvious a fake, the
conflict is not even adequately realized in personal terms, let alone the
possibility of a larger symbolic dimension.

It is only when Markandaya subjects her theme to a far deeper probing that she
is able to create living characters in meaningful dilemmas. The first novel in
which this is achieved is A Silence, of Desire (1960). Here, the clash between
the Westernoriented rationalism of Dandekar, who wants his wife

Sarojini to get herself operated for a tumour and the traditional religious faith of
Sarojini, which relies absolutely on the faith-healing of the Swami (a much more
credible figure than his counterpart in Possession) is adequately realized. It also
leads to a larger conflict, exemplifying the Hegelian concept of two kinds of
good pitted against each other—in this case, the domestic peace of the partially
privileged middle-class represented by Dandekar versus the Interests of the
totally unprivileged poor who will starve if the Swami is driven away, as
Dandekar and others similarly situated wish.

The retreat to undemanding superficialities in A Handful of Rice (1966) is quite

obvious. This story of Ravi, an urban vagabond on whom lower middle-class
respectability is thrust, when he marries Nalini the daughter of a poor tailor, is
unconvincing because the hero’s gangster friends are totally unrealized
creations, while Nalini remains the typical, long-suifering Hindu wife.

The Coffer Dams (1969) marks a distinct watershed in the development of

Markandaya’s fiction. There is now a serious attempt to consolidate the artistic
gains made in A Silence of Desire', at tne same time, me novelist also tries to
evolve a new style, which sounds like a mixture of Faulkner and the later Henry
James. In this narrative of the arrival of a firm of British engineers to construct a
river-dam in Independent India, Markandaya offers one of her most
comprehensive pictures of the Indo-British encounter. The various British
attitudes to India include Clinton’s studied neutrality based on the desirability of
a purely working relationship with Indians; his wife Helen’s curiosity and
fascination for the tribals, which results in her affair with Bashiam, the ‘jungly
wallah’; Millie’s pathologic cal fear of the ‘natives’; and Lefevre’s friendly
stance. The novelist views the Indian responses in an equally objective manner,
highlighting the ultra-sensitiveness of Krishnan and Gopal Rao and investing the
death of the old tribal chief which coincides with the completion of the dam with
obvious symbolic significance. The new style with its primacy of oblique and
convoluted expression, tortured syntax and jerky sentence-structure, however,
does not make for easy reading.

The Nowhere Man (1972) deals with the same theme in a more limited, but far
more intensive manner, and against an English setting. Srinivas, an old Indian
widower and a Londoner for the major part of his life, finds a kindred soul in old
Mrs Pickering, a divorcee. But during the anti-immigrant wave of the sixties, he
is persecuted, though he does have some sympathetic white neighbours. He dies
when a fanatic sets fire to his house, but even before that his discovery that he
has developed leprosy (an evocative symbol both of his isolation and his
disintegration) has already spelt tragedy. Unfortunately, Mrs Pickering remains a
shadowy character and the Mandarin style which contmues ‘to stall, to deal in
obliquities' is a constant irritant.

In Two Virgins (1973), a slight work, Markandaya lapses into her earlier
superficiality in once again telling an unconvincing tale of Indian village life.
The contrast between the two sisters, Lalitha, the ‘child of grace’, who yearns to
become a ‘town miss' and Saroja, the ‘child of the soil’ and the ‘country miss’ is
utterly machine-made, while the theme, of the adolescent’s loss of innocence
could not perhaps be handled more cruedly than here.

The longest and the most ambitious of Markandaya’s novels. The Golden
Honeycomb (1977) is her first attempt at historical fiction. This is a chronicle of
three generations of the princely family of Devapur, covering a period of about a
century from 1850 to Independence. The novelist appears to have too many irons
in the fictional fire here. Scenes like the elaborate account of the Delhi Durbar of
1903 are in the manner of conventional historical fiction; while at many places
the impression is created that what the novelist is primarily interested in is the
psychological workings of the minds of the characters, irrespective of the
historical setting. And along with scenes of authentic local colour, there are
incidents like Prince Rabi’s affair with a slum girl in Bombay, which arecredible
only as fantasy. The upshot is a honeycomb from which the queen bee of a
purposive centre is missing. Furthermore, the experiments of narrating the story
in snippets instead of chapters and putting a major part of the narrative in the
present tense are of doubtful value, considering the vast period of time covered,
while the ghosts of Faulkner, and James still continue to haunt the style. Unless
Kamala Markandaya ceases to try to be a Faulkner in a frilled sari or a James in
Madras jeans, her maturer fictional utterance is unlikely to be completely
authentic.

Nayantara Sahgal (1927—) is usually regarded as an expo- nent of the political

novel, but politics is only one of her two major concerns. She herself has
declared that each of her novels ‘more or less reflects the political era we are
passing through’; and daughter of Vijayalakshmi Pandit and niece of Jawaharlal
Nehru, Nayantara naturally had an upbringing in which politics was inevitably a
strong ambience; but along with the obvious political theme, her fiction is also
preoccupied with the modern Indian woman’s search for sexual freedom and
self-realization. Neither of the themes is, however, handled with sufficient
complexity and the failure to establish a clear ideational relationship between the
political turmoil outside and the private torment of broken marriages robs most
of her novels of a unified effect.

Of Sahgal’s five novels, the first, A Time To be Happy (1958) is a loose

chronicle dealing with two north Indian families during the last stages of the
freedom-struggle and the arrival of Independence. While the awakening of
young Sanad, the ‘Brown Englishman’ to the social and political realities of
newly Independent India is the main theme, Maya, whose traditional upbringing
makes her marriage to the anglicized Harish ‘a sterile, if exotic bloom’ is the
first of Sahgal’s trapped women seeking escape into extra-marital arms. This
Time of Morning (1968) contains one of Sahgal’s best realized political portraits
— Kalyan Sinha, a man with acid on his tongue, a gimlet in his eye and a chip
on his shoulder—a figure whose resemblance to V.K. Krishna Menon is quite
plain. Rashmi, who feels ‘how like prolonged starvation wrong marriage could
be, and Uma, the nymphomaniac, again represent women chafing against the
marriage code. In Storm in Chandigarh (1969), the political background is that
of the division of the Punjab into the two

states of Punjab and Haryana. The Home Minister is a thinly disguised portrait
of LalBahadur Shastri and Gyan Singh of Pratap Singh Kairon, the former Chief
Minister of Punjab. The protagonist, Vishal Dubey, a civil servant sent to
Chandigarh to deal with the explosive political situation there, finds ample time
to have an aflair with Saroj, whose husband Inder in turn has a liaison with
Mara, the wife of Jit. The resulting storms in the two domestic teacups remain
thematically unrelated to the storm in Corbusier’s well-planned city. The
domestic plot dealing with a broken marriage in The Day in Shadow (1971) was
obviously inspired by the personal experience of the novelist. Here again, while
Sardar Sahib, the stern senior Minister for Petroleum and Sumer Singh, the
Deputy Minister, who is a ‘glamour boy’ are well realized, the private world of
the divorced Simrit bears little organic relation to the political background. Nor
is the disintegration of the marriage presented with the necessary analytical
power. A Situation in New Delhi (1977) deals in a rather superficial manner with
the aftermath of Nehru’s death, the Naxalite movement and student unrest. In a
sense, this novel registers a definite advance in Sahgal’s fictional art, since there
is no cleavage here between the political and the private worlds, the main actors
in both being the same. But Sahgal’s concept of the political novel remains
limited to a few easily recognizable portraits of well-known politicians and A
Situation in New Delhi, like its predecessors, also fails to be in the same class as
major political novels like Disraeli’s Sybil and Andre Malraux’s Man's Fate, in
which action and character are solidly grounded in significant, political issues
and their repercussions on individuals and society.

In contrast with Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Dcsai (1937—), youngest of the major
Indian English women novelists, is more interested in the interior landscape of
the mind than in political and social realities. Writing, for her, 'is an effort to
discover, and then to underline, and finally to convey the true significance of
things.’-* Her novels, according to her, ‘deal with what Ortega Y Gasset called
the terror of facing, single-handed, the ferocious assaults of existence.’27
Desai’s protagonists are persons ‘for whom aloneness alone’ is ‘the sole natural
condition, aloneness alone the treasure worth treasuring’. They are mostly
women, who, though they have reached different stages in life (from school-girl
to grandmother), are all fragile introverts ‘trapped in their own skins.’ Their
emotional traumas sometimes lead to violent death, in the end. Maya in Cry, the
Peacock (1963) is obsessed with death and haunted by an astrological prediction
that her marriage is going to end in its fourth year, with the death of either wife
or husband. She can establish no effective communication with her husband,
who is unsentimental, matter-of-fact and twice her age. There are no children of
the marriage and this accentuates Maya’s isolation, which becomes total when
she murders her husband in a fit of insane fury. The symbolism of the peacock,
whose ‘dance of joy is the dance of death’ has however, no adequate relevance
to Maya’s plight. In Voices in the City (1965) Desai tries unsuccessfully to make
her setting—in this case, Calcutta, ‘City of Kali, goddess of Death’—a
contributory factor in another tale of alienated individuals. Nirode and his two
sisters, Monisha and Amla are rebels against the stolid conventions of middle
class life and long for creativity and self-expression. Each comes to grief: Nirode
ends up as a drifting bohemian, Monisha commits suicide and Amla is heart-
broken when her love is rejected. Bye-bye Blackbird (1971) is the only novel of
Anita Desai in which social and political realities take precedence over probing
of the mind. This picture of the East-West encounter as revealed in the lives of
Indian emigrants to Britain, however, adds little to our awareness of the varied
implications of this phenomenon. Curiously enough, the British characters in the
novel appear, on the whole, to be better realized than the Indian protagonists,
Dev and Adit, whose sudden Golte-face at the end is less than convincing.
Where Shall We Go This Summer (1975) marks a return to the autonomous
world of inner reality. Sita, the main character here, appears to be a less morbid
Maya after four children. The cruelty and callousness of urban life stifle her and
when she is with child again, she panicks at the thought of bringing a new,
fragile being into this harsh world, and runs away to a small island, which has
childhood associations for her; but Anally allows her husband to persuade her to
return. The novel is tightly structured and the island is an evocative symbol of a
lost paradise but Sita’s sudden capitulation at the end comes as an anti-climax. In
Fire On the Mountain (1977) two alienated souls confront each other: Nanda, an
unsentimental, old widow living as a recluse in' an isolated house in the hills,
and Raka, her great grand-daughter, a shy, lonely schoolgirl, a convalescent
guest, who is a ‘recluse by nature, by instinct’, as opposed to Nanda, ‘a recluse
out of vengeance for a long life of duty and obligation’. Their relationship begins
with mutual indifference and a jealous guarding of frontiers but later Nanda
makes overtures which are flrmly rejected by Raka. The sudden death of
Nanda’s friend, Ila Das, a social worker, who is raped and strangled, compels
Nanda to review her past and confess that she has been a self-deceiver, but the
recognition comes too late, as Raka has started a forest fire which threatens to
destroy the house. Since Ila Das remains a one- dimensional character, the
violent ending appears contrived. The title of Clear Light of Day (1980)
indicates the main theme of seeing the light. The protagonist, Vimla, is an
elderly spinster living in a decaying house surrounded by a neglected garden
containing a disused black well (into which a white cow has drowned years ago),
with a neurotic younger brother to whom going out alone on the street is a nerve-
shattering ordeal. The arrival of her younger sister with her family stirs old
memories of shared childhood and past traumas. The shift from the present to the
past and back in the narrative helps create the appropriate mood of nostalgia, of
long-forgotten impressions, words and actions being suddenly suffused with ‘the
light of her days. Unfortunately the focus is not on Vimla’s con

sciousness alone and this results inevitably in a diffusion of effect; nor is her
final moment of epiphany adequately motivated.

Anita Desai unravels the tortuous involutions of sensibility with subtlety and
finesse and her ability to evoke the changing aspects of Nature matched with
human moods is another of her assets, though her easy mastery of the language
and her penchant for image and symbol occasionally result in preciosity and
over-writing. If her fiction is able to advance from the vision of ‘aloneness’ as a
psychological state of mind to that Of alienation as a metaphysical enigma—as
one hopes it will— Anita Desai may one day achieve an amplified pattern of
significant exploration of consciousness comparable to Virginia Woolf at her
best.

Very few of the rest of the women novelists of the period have so far attempted
sustained fictional writing, most of them remaining content with a solitary novel
or two each. Of Santha Rama Rau’s two novels, Remember the House (1956) is
a charming picture of the East-West encounter, particularly as it affects young
Indira, whose growth from adolescence to maturity is another theme. The
Adventuress (1970), the story of a young Philippino girl stranded in post-war
Japan, however, fails to rise above the level of superficiality, though the exotic
setting is portrayed with some expertise. Nergis Dalai’s experience of journalism
has hardly proved a salutary influence on her fiction. Her Minari (1967) is an
account of high class life at a hill station, with conventional characters (a
Byronic hero, a vamp etc.) in stock situations.Two Sisters (1973), a contrastive
study of twins at opposite poles both physically and mentally, starts promisingly
as a keen probe into jealousy but ends in melodrama. And in The Inner Door
(1976) the Guide motif of enforced sainthood is handled as crudely as the stock
theme of East-West encounter is treated in The Girls from Overseas (1979).

Minor fiction by women offers some authentic chronicles of social life in Hindu,
Muslim and Parsi households. Venu Chitale’s (Mrs Leela Khare) In Transit
(1950) is an evocative picture of three generations of a Poona Brahmin joint
family between the two World Wars. Two novels provide revealing glimpses
into the lives of Muslim families: Zeenuth Futehally’s Zohra( 1951), with
Hyderabad in the Gandhian age as its setting, and Attiah Hosain’s Sunlight on a
Broken Column (1961), a nostalgic account of aristocratic life in pre-Partition
Lucknow. And Perin Bharucha’s The Fire Worshippers (1968) deals with Parsi
life.

Prominent examples of historical fiction are Vimala Raina’s Ambapali (1962)

which takes us to the India of Buddha’s time and more recently, Manorama
Modak's Single in the Wheel (1978), a novel set against the fall of the last
Peshwa in the early nineteenth century.

Shakuntala Shrinagesh’s one novel, The Little Black Box (1955) is an

interesting, though not wholly successful, experiment in psychological fiction,
depicting the thought processes of Sarala, an embittered rich woman, who lies
dying in a hospital with her money-box under her bed.

The nineteen fifties and sixties witnessed comparatively few novels by women.
Among these are Lotika Ghose’s White Dawns of Awakening (1950); Mrinalini
Sarabhai’s This Alone is True (1952); Bani Ray’s Srilata and Sampa{ 1953);
Sally Atho- gia’s Gold in the Dust (1958); Tapati Mookerjee’s, Murder Needs a
Staircase (1962) and Six Faces of Eve (1963); Padmini Sen- gupta’s Red
Hibiscus (1962); Muriel Wasi’s Too High For Rivalry (1967)—a fine picture of
a girl’s school drawn by an insider; Hilda Raj’s The House of Ramiah (1967);
Sita Ratnam- mal’s Beyond the Jungle (1968) and Meenakshi Puri’s Pay on the
First(1968). Veena Paintal’s Serenity in Storm (1966) and other novels including
the later Midnight Woman (1979) are unabashed pot-boilers.

Among novels by women published during the nineteen seventies may be

mentioned Raji Narasimhan’s The Heart of Standing is you cannot Fly (1973)
and Forever Free (1979)— an absorbing tale of a young woman’s search for
fulfilment; Bharati Mukherjee’s Tiger's Daughter (1973) and Wife (1976)— a
sympathetic study of a frustrated Bengali wife in New York; Veena Nagpal’s
Karmayogi (1974) and Compulsion (1975), which follow the best-seller formula
with a vengeance; Jai Nimbkar’sTemporary Answers (1974); Shanta Rameshwar
Rao’s Children of God (1976), which has a Harijan woman as its protagonist;
Kamala Das’s Alphabet of Lust(1976), which suggests that the novel is not the
right medium for this talented poet; Rama Mehta’sInside the Haveli (1977,
Sahitya Akademi Award 1979) an engaging story of Rajasthan Purdah life;
Shouri Daniels’s The Salt Doll(1977); Jyoti Jafa’s Nurjahan (1978); Uma
Vasudeva’s The Song of Anasuya( 1978) and Anita Kumar’s The Night of the
Seven Dawns (1979).

Apart from Bhattacharya and the other major novelists, there are few writers of
fiction with a substantial corpus to their credit in the post-Independence period.
Anand (Arthur Samuel) Lad’s picture of the blasd upper class life in The House
At Adampur(1956) and Seasons of Jupiter (1958) is undistinguished by either
keen insight into character or control of fictional technique. The hero of Seasons
ofJupiter, who takes to a life of renunciation after a prolonged pursuit of pleasure
but before the end once again returns to a worldly life, is hardly a credible figure
in his avatar as ascetic. M.V. Rama Sarma, a senior academic and noted Milton
scholar, has written four novels, in two of which, viz., The Stream (1956) and
Look Homeward (1976), the theme of East-West encounter figures, with the
hero going abroad for education. The Farewell Party (1976), cast in the form of
the reverie of a professor on the day of his retirement, has many interesting
reflections on the educational scene in India today; while The Bliss of Life
(1979) is a novel on the life of the ancient Andhra saint poet, Kshetrayya. Ruskin
Bond, an Anglo-Indian, has not kept the promise of his autobiographical first
novel, The Room on the Roof (1956), an evocative study of an observant
Eurasian boy’s reactions to the colourful Indian scene. His later novels include
An Axe for the Rani (1972) and Love is a Sad Story (1975). Bond has also
written a number of books for children. Jatindra Mohan Ganguli’s novels include
When East and West Meet (1961), Two Mothers (1964), Fire on the Snows of
Himalayas (1965), The Fisherman of Kerala (1967) and Bond of Blood (1967).
In spite of their variety of scene and setting (ranging from Bengal to Kerala),
they are marred by many conventional motifs. The novels of Romen Basu—A
House Full of People (1068), A Gift of Love (1974) and Candles and Roses
(1978) —carry too many elements of popular circulating library

fiction to warrant serious scrutiny.

Not many minor novels of interest were published during the first two decades
after Independence. Among these may be mentioned Dilip Kumar Roy’s The
Upward Spiral (1949), a philosophical novel; Huthi Singh's Maura (1951), a
political novel set in a pre-Independence Rajput State; Aubrey Menen’s satirical
fantasy—The Prevalence of Witches (1955); S.Y. Krishnaswamy’sKalyani's
Husband (1957); K.J. Shridharani’s Adventures of an Upside-Down Ttee (1957);
Victor Anant's The Revolving Man(1959)-the story of a youth,- symbolically
named John Atma, who finds himself between two worlds— the Eastern and the
Western; P.M. Nityananda’s nostalgic account of south Indian college days—
The Long, Long Days (1960); K.B. Vaid’s Steps in Darkness—an exercise in
urban naturalism (1962); Ved Mehta’s extravaganza set in England—
Delinquent Chacha (1967); Nirmal Jacob’s Monsoon: A Story of Rural Kerala
(1968); Cartoonist R.K. Laxman’s ironic study of urban life—Sorry, No
Room(1969) and Dilip Hiro’s A Triangular View (1969)—a story of three
Indian youths in Britain.

With the growing interest in Indian English literature, there was a sudden spurt
of fiction—many of them first novels— during the nineteen seventies. Notable
among these are B.K. Karanjia’s novel of Parsi life in Bombay—Mote of an
Indian (1970), a fine ethnological study; Leslie dc Noronha’s story of colonial
Goan life—The Mango and the Tamarind Tree (1970); V.K. Gokak’sNarahari:
Prophet of India (1972), which projects a hero, who is the beacon-star of
India’s‘science of the spirit’; Timeri Murari’sThe Marriage (1972), Reginald and
Jamila Massey’s The Immigrants (1973), Sasthi Brata’s She and He (1973),
Saros Cowasjee’s Goodbye to Elsa (1975), A. Bhaskar Rao’s The Secret (1978)
and S.S. Dhami’s Maluka (1978)—all variations on the theme of East-West
confrontation, some with a generous helping of sex (though Cowasjee's novel
offers some splendid black humour also); K M. Trishanku’s Onion Peel (1973)
—a story of a sexual orgy with some psychological interest since the highly
sexed hero is to have an operation which will make him impotent; Bunny
Reuben’s You, I and Her (1973); Raj Gill’s The Rape(1974), The Golden Dawn
(1974) and The Infidel (1979); D.R. Mankekar’s No, My Son, Never (1974)—a
novel about journalism by an experienced journalist; Nishi Khanolkar’s
Dwasuparna (1976), a story of public school life; B.S. Gidwani's The Sword of
Tipu Sultan (1976)—a highly idealized portrait of the ’Tiger of Mysore’; Rohit
Handa’s study of the Naxalite movement—Comrade Sahib (1977); H.S. Gill’s
story of communal hatred—Ashes and Petals (1977); two presentations of
corruption in high places—Rattan Mann’s Silence with the Storm (1978), the
autobiography of a scientist fed up with officialdom, and Holier Than
Thou(1978)—a journalistic peep into politics, by Sudhakar Bhat; Kasthuri Sree-
nivasan’s Service with a Smile (1978)—a highly diverting social satire on small-
town busybodies, in the spirit of Nagarajan’s Chronicles of Kedaram; Vikram
Kapur’s sex-dominated The Traumatic Bite (1978) and Shiv K. Kumar’s The
Bone’s Prayer (1979), in which a story of sexual betrayal is bandied with the
same agonized intensity which marks some of the verse of this writer.
Narendrapal Singh, noted Punjabi author, has recently published English
translations of his fiction including Trapped (1979).
The Short Story
The variety and fecundity of the post-Independence novel are hardly evinced in
the field of the short story, the writing of which still continues to be mostly a by-
product of the novel- workshop. Of the novelists, Bhattacharya, Khushwant
Singh, Malgonkar, Nahal and Joshi have produced short story collections, while
among the women writers, apart from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Anita Desai,
Nergis Dalai and Attiah Hosain, the number of the practitioners of this form is
not very large, as compared to the novelists.

Of Bhattacharya’s two collections of short stories, Indian Cavalcade (1948), an

early work, is a re-telling of striking incidents from Indian history. Steel Hawk
(1968) contains very few stories with psychological interest, the rest being either
anecdotes or static character-sketches, while there is a strong whiff of
sentimentality around many of them. The title story is easily the most successful
of all; it is a perceptive account of the reactions of rustics when a helicopter
descends near the village. The finest touch is the lively curiosity of the old
Grandma, ‘who was of Yesterday was possessed by Today.’ ’She Born of Light’
effectively brings out the conflict between the Man and the Artist in a painter;
but stories like ‘Names are Not Labels’ and ‘Acrobats’ peter out rather tamely
after much promise of psychological portrayal.

For the bibliographer, Khushwant Singh is the author of four volumes of short
stories—The Mark of Vishnu and other Stories(1950); The Voice of God and
other Stories (1957): A Bride For the Sahib and Other Stories (1967) and Black
Jasmine (1971). But in actual fact, a large majority of the stories in the first,
second and fourth collections are the same. Singh’s most characteristic note is a
rather heavy-handed satire on several aspects of modern Indian life, including
bureaucracy (e.g., ‘Man How the Government of India Run’); democratic
election procedures (e.g. ‘The Voice of God’); anglicized Indians (e.g. ‘A Bride
For the Sahib’); and Indians abroad (‘Mr. Kanjoos and The Great Miracle’). The
uproarious farce in ‘Maiden Voyage of the Jal Hindia’ and ‘Rats and Cats in the
House of Culture’ is also typical of this author, whose obsession with sex
colours stories such as ‘The Rape’, ‘Kusum* and ‘Morning of the Night Before’.
In ‘The Mark of Vishnu’, ‘The Memsahib of Mandla’ and ‘Death Comes to
Daulat Ram’ we find him drawing upon the supernatural and folk-lore—the
usual standby of the Indian English short story writer. That Khushwant Singh is
not entirely incapable of more delicate effects is proved by stories like ‘A Love
Affair in London’ and ‘The Portrait of a Lady’—a memorable pen-portrait of a
grandmother, recalling old Sabrai in / shall Not Hear the Nightingale.

Manohar Malgonkar’s stories have been collected in A Toast in Warm Wine

(1974), Bombay Beware (1975) andRumbleTumble (1977). They provide
diverting glimpses of the world of activism including several areas such as army
life, espionage, hunting, mining, smuggling, treasure-seeking and film-making.
Most of these activists appear to specialize in one single exercise which marks
them as birds of the same feather—viz., one- up-manship. While this certainly
makes for amusing anecdotes usually with a snap ending, it naturally constricts
the author’s view of the possibilities of the short story. For instance, even when
he deals with situations of strong social import in stories like ‘Bondage’ and
‘Two Red Roosters’, Malgonkar seems to be more interested in the surprise
ending than in the social problems involved.‘Bondage’ brings out the irony of
the new Tenancy Laws which, with all their avowed good intentions of reform
may, in actual practice, result in harming the cause of the landless. But the
author’s handling of his material makes it clear that the ironic reversal interests
him more than the social implications. In ‘Two Red Roosters’, an old farmer,
whose buffalo is dead, prays to the spirit of the underworld to get his field
ploughed. His prayers are answered—though in a totally unexpected way—when
an enthusiastic ‘Kheti-sahib’ makes a Government tractor available for the
purpose in order to advertise the advantages of mechanized farming. The
situation here is very similar to that in Anand’s ‘Tractor and the Corn Goddess’,
but while Anand’s story unmistakably touches upon the theme of tradition
versus modernity, Malgonkar just manfully works up to his punch-line. Like his
novels, Malgon- kar’s short stories also prove that an exceptionally varied
experience of life does not make for major art, if a writer consistently
approaches experience obstinately wearing emotional and intellectual blinkers.

Chaman Nahal and Arun Joshi have so far produced a solitary short story
collection each, neither of which is a major work. In Nahal’s The Weird Dance
and Other Stories (1965) middle-class match-making in North-Indian families
and all its ironies is a recurrent theme, and the Partition and its aftermath are a
strong presence. The title-story, which presents a woman, who, shattered by the
death of her child, suddenly indulges in marital infidelity, is a rather
unconvincing attempt at psychological portrayal.

The characters in Arun Joshi’s The Survivor (1975) range from young Eve-
teasers to a dotard who tries to cling to youth; and from a sex-obsessed rustic
servant to a middle aged travelling salesman attached to his crippled daughter.
While some of these stories tend to be merely anecdotal (the besetting sin of the
Indian English short story in general), others like ‘The Boy with the Flute’ and
‘The Intruder in the Discotheque handle fantasy rather inexpertly. The title story
treats the Billy Biswastheme superficially, but ‘The Home Coming’, a totally
unsentimental tale of a young soldier who returns from the War to find himself a
changed man in a changed world, is easily the best story in the collection.

Ruskin Bond has published a number of collections of short stories: Neighbour's

Wife and other Stories (1966); My First Love and other Stories (1968); The
Maneater of Manjari (1972) and The Girl From Copenhagen (1977). His
favourite subjects are pets, animals and a variety of have-nots, including waifs,
orphans, abnormal children, restless adolescents and frustrated old men, whom
he portrays with genuine compassion, His exercises in the supernatural like
‘Never shoot a Monkey’ and ‘Haunted Bungalow’ are adequate, though by no
means brilliant. Bond is at his best in evoking a mood of nostalgia for the
vanished sights and scenes of boyhood, of the pathos of the inexorable march of
Time, as in ‘The Meeting Pool’, I can’t climb Trees Any More’ and ‘My
Father’s Trees'. In all the three stories, the middle-aged narrator visits a scene of
his boyhood and feels the impact of the change both in the setting and himself.
Another special feature of Bond's stories is his acute responsiveness to nature,
the ‘great affinity between trees and men’. It is not simply a matter of nature
description as a narrative technique, but a genuine feeling for the natural world
which has somewhat of a Wordsworthian quality about it.

Unfortunately, Bond has not always written in this vein and has his own share of
slick ‘magazine stories’ as well.

Manoj Das, winner of the Sahitya Akademi award for his Oriya writings, has
published four cbllections of short stories: Song For Sunday and other Stories
(1967), Short Stories (1969), The Crocodile’s Lady (1975) and Fables and
Fantasies For Adults(1977). Das tries his hand at several narrative strategies
including satirical extravaganza as in ‘The Mystery of the Missing Cap’ (the
missing cap is a minister’s and it is stolen by a monkey); humour, as in ‘The
Sage of Tarungiri and the Seven Old Seekers’; tabular presentation as in ‘The
Panchatantra for Adults’; comic fantasy as in ‘Sharma and the Wonderful Lump’
and psychological delineation as in ‘A Song for Sunday’ (in which a staid clerk,
who gives charity to a mad old woman everyday, suddenly joins her on a Sunday
and himself becomes mad). Some of his stories are translations from Oriya
Sasthi Brata’s A Search For Home (1975) contains stories which are for the most
part, obviously thinly disguised autobiographical pieces with the author’s
reflections on Indian life and culture—more particularly life in Calcutta and the
EastWest encounter. They go over much of the same ground as Brata’s
autobiography, My God Died Young but with expectedly diminished impact.
The stories in Encounter (1975) are variations on the mating game mostly
against a western setting. If mere frankness were everything in literature, these
stories would have deserved a high rating.

The short stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala show substantially the same attitude
and response that characterize her novels. Her four short story collections are:
Like Birds, like Fishes (1963), An Experience of India (1966), A Stronger
Climate (1968) andHow I Became A Holy Mother (1976). In the stories dealing
with life in Indian joint families, Jhabvala once again shows her understanding
of complex personal relationships, in stories like ‘The Old Lady’ and ‘A Loss of
Faith’. And when her realism is harnessed to a subtle analysis of mental
processes as in ‘The Sixth Child’, which presents the great expectations of a
middle-aged businessman with five daughters on the day of his wife’s lying in,
she writes one of her finest stories. Her Indian characters include adolescents
and young people of both the sexes and a host of middle-aged females ranging
from staid housewives to kept women. Jhabvala, however, remains far too often
content with surface realism and interesting reportage alone as in ‘Lekha’ and
‘My First Marriage’, refusing to accept the challenge of deeper probing of the
psyche.

In the Introduction to An Experience of India, Jhabvala recounts her changing

response to India and declares, ‘I am no longer interested in India. What I am
interested in now is myself in India.’ In her later volumes, therefore, the
experience of Westerners in India becomes a staple theme, though she continues
to paint vignettes of Indian life as before. The Europeans in India appearing in A
Stronger Climate are divided into two classes: the ‘Seekers’, who come to India
in search of some- thing which Europe cannot offer; and the ‘Sufferers’—i.e.,
those who, in their long sojourn in India have developed a curious love-hate
relationship with this country, which at once exasperates and enslaves them.
Among the ‘Seekers’ are young English girls in love with Indians (e.g. Betsy in
‘Passion’) or drawn to Swamis (e.g. ‘A Spiritual Call’); the ‘Sufferers’ include
old men and women like Dr. Ernst, a naturalized alien, who, with all his fanatic
love of India, is still regarded as a foreigner; and Miss Tuhy, a spinster, who
returns to England after Independence but comes back to India feeling home-
sick, only to discover that things are now far different from what they used to be.
Jhabvala’s objectivity, which was a definite asset in her comic studies, however,
becomes a liability here, because the carefully cultivated clinical detachment
prevents her from bringing out the pathos of these annals of alienation. The
return to garish irony in later stories like ‘How I Became a Holy Mother’
definitely indicates that as in her later novels, Jhabvala’s perceptions have now
become more blunt, and the earlier fineness of touch has gone—one hopes, not
for good.

Anita Desai's solitary collection, Games At Twilight and Other Stories (1978)
again underscores her fascination for the country of the mind in preference to
what happens in the world of men and matters. Her characters are persons with
keen sensibility and it is not surprising that many of them are children,

women, artists and introverts. In the title story, a boy hides himself too long in a
hide and seek game and feels frustrated to realize, when he comes out, that the
game is already over. ‘Scholar and Gipsy’ presents an American woman who,
fed up with the heat, the squalor and the boredom of urban India, finds peace in
the quiet of Manali. ‘The Accompanist’ is a study of an artist who is convinced
after some soul-searching that he can never become an ‘ustad’ in his own right;
in ‘Studies in the Park' a tense, worried college student’s conflicts are resolved
when the affection between a beautiful anaemic woman and a very old man
brings to him a vision of intense tenderness. Dcsai’s presentation of the inner
experience is authentic only when she provides adequate motivation for feeling
and response. When this is missing the result is sheer mystification as in the
story, ‘Surface Texture’, where the sight of a cut melon suddenly and
unaccountably transforms a Government clerk into a sadhu. Again, as in her
novels, in these stories also one gets the feeling that the journey through the
interior regions is yet to take one both to the dizzy heights and the tenebrous
depths.

There are severaL other women writers with a solitary collection each to their
credit. Krishna Hutheesing’s Shadow on the Wall (1948) is based on the lives of
women prisoners encountered during the author’s jail term. Attiah Hosain’s
Phoenix Fled and other Stories (1953) contains evocative sketches of North
Indian women; Jai Nimbkar in her The Lotus Leaves and other stories(1971)
deals realistically with middle class Maharashtrian life, often with an acute
perception of the complexity of human motives as in the story, ‘In Memoriam’,
which shows a family fanatically clinging to the fading memory of a young son
killed in an accident some years ago, until his surviving brother boldly revolts
against this futile logic of placing the dead before the living. Sujatha Bala
Subramanian’s The House in the Hills and Other Stories (1973) reveals a keen
understanding of different kinds of people including an old-world zamindar
(‘The Zamindar of Pallipuram’), a lonely motherless boy lost in his world of
dreams (‘Ants’), a domineering mother (‘Mother’) and a poor clerk living in his
fool’s paradise of fantasy (‘The House in the Hills’). In her The Nude(1977),
Nergis Dalai mostly offers well-made stories with a surprise ending, or
melodrama. It is only when she concerns herself seriously with motivation that
she writes her better stories like ‘The Exiles’—a study of an old British couple
about to go home after having been too long in the East. The stories in A Doll
For the Child Prostitute (1977) by Kamala Das generally harp upon the sex-
theme. The title story is marred by an overplus of melodrama and most of the
other stories are too sketchy to present adequately realized experience.

Some of the other short story collections by women are: Perin C. Mehta’s S ort
Stories (n.d.); Rajkumari Singh’s A Garland of Stories (1960); Usha John’s The
Unknown Lover and other Stories (1960); Jaya Urs’s Song and the Dream and
Other Short Stories (1971), Padma Hejmadi’s Coigns of Vantage (1972);
Margaret Chatterjee’s At the Homeopath's(sic) and other Stories(1973); Raji
Narasimhan’s The Marriage of Bela (1978); Shashi Deshpande’s The Legacy
(1978) and Juliette Banerjee’s The Boyfriend (1978).

Among other short story collections of the period may be mentioned N.R.
Deobhankar’s Hemkumari and other Stories(1949); A.C. Kazi’s Random Short
Stories (1951); M.K. Unni Nayar’s My Malabar (1952), Sachindra Mazumdar’s
Creatures of Destiny (1954); N.S. Phadke’s Where Angels sell Eggs and other
stories (1957) and Sun-beams and Shadows (1962)—both translations by the
author himself from his Marathi originals; G.D. Khosla’s The Price of a Wife
(1958) and The Horoscope cannot lie and other stories (1961); Kewlian Sio’s A
Small World (1960) and Dragons: Stories and Poems (1978); A.C.
Biswas’sStories of Indian Life (1964); Leslie de Noronha’s Stories (1966); P.
Balakrishnan’s The Gold Bangle (1966); Balaraj Manara’sThe Altar and Other
Stories (1967); M.D. Melwani’s Stories of a Salesman (1967); J.M. Ganguli’s
Son of Jesus and other stories(1967); Saros Cowasjee’s Stories and Sketches
(1970) and Nude Therapy (1978), which contains all the stories in the earlier
book, with the addition of three new pieces; Bunny Reuben’s Monkeys on the
Hill of God (1970); Ramkumar’s Stories (1970); A.D. Gorwala’s The Queen of
Beauty and other Tales (1971); Jug Suraiya’s The Interview (1971); K.B. Vaid’s
Silence and other stories (1972), translated by the author himself from his Hindi
original; Nirmal Varma’s The Hill Station and Other Stories (1973); Vivek
Adarkar’s We could be Happy Together (1973); Hamdi Bey’s Small Town
Stories (1974); Farrukh Dhondy’s East End at Your Feet (1976) and Come To
Mecca (1978); S.B. Capoor’s A Woman's Tears and Other Stories (1977); Jai
Ratan’s

The Angry Goddess (n.d ), K.N. Daruwalla’s Sword and Abyss (1979), and Shiv
K. Kumar’s Beyond Love and Other Stories(1980).
Drama
Unlike poetry and fiction, drama has not registered very notable gains during the
post-Independence period. An important reason for this is that drama—
essentially a composite art involving the playwright, the actors and the audience
in a shared experience on the stage—has its own problems of which the other
literary forms are free. It is true that post-Independence drama did benefit by the
growing interest abroad in Indian English literature, and a number of plays by
dramatists like Asif Currimbhoy, Partap Sharma and Gurcharan Das were
successfully staged in Europe and the United States of America. But these stray
performances abroad, in spite of all their advantages, did not lead to the
establishment of a regular school of Indian English drama at home. This was
mainly because the encouragement which drama received from several quarters
immediately after Independence was monopolized by the theatre in the Indian
regional languages, while Indian English drama continued to feed on crumbs
fallen from its rich cousins’ tables.

Actually, the first Five Year Plan after Independence encouraged the performing
arts as an effective means of public enlightenment and the National School of
Drama was established in Delhi. Institutions for training in dramatics were
founded in big cities; drama departments were established in some universities
and the National Drama Festival was started in Delhi by the Sangeet Natak
Akademi in 1954. But all these developments have led, almost exclusively, to
the growth of regional language theatre, while most Indian English plays have
had to remain content with a performance or two each even in big cities. This
lack of opportunity to subject his plays to the acid test of a living theatre in his
own country (an Indian English play staged abroad may succeed simply as an
exotic tour de force) has, as in the past, continued to hamstring the dramatist of
this period also.

As in the earlier periods, the number of playwrights with sustained dramatic

activity remains very small, though stray contributions are quite numerous.

The Tagore-Aurobindo-Kailasam tradition of poetic drama continues, but with a

difference, in the hands of Manjeri Isva- ran, G.V. Desani, Lakhan Deb and
Pritish Nandy. Isvaran’s Yama and Yami (1948) is a dialogue in poetic prose,
with a prologue and an epilogue, dealing with the incestuous love of Yami for
her brother. Based on the Rig Veda Samhita, Yama and Yami makes no attempt
to look at the ancient legend in a new perspective. Again, restricting itself to a
brief dialogue between brother and sister, it does not exploit full drama out of
the situation; nor does the style rise above stale romantic diction.

G.V. Desani’s solitary experiment with drama, Hali (1950) is a much more
complex work. Desani himself explains its genesis thus: ‘I had a personal
tragedy-a serious love affair. Hali is a monument to this affair and tragedy. It
took me a very long time to write Hali. I planned it so carefully as to make
people moved to tears and therefore reduced the whole to essentials without any
padding whatsoever. l,was then carry* ing a deep hurt in my heart and Hali was
to be a gesture of loyalty to the love I bore a friend. After this tragedy I felt so
helpless that I would have been killed by the sorrow but for some kind
friends.’48

Described as a ‘poem play ', Hali was 'originally a work of nearly 300 pages, and
written and planned as an epic, and was later abridged into a drama in poetic
prose. It was successfully staged at the Watergate Theatre, London in July 1950,
‘aided by visual devices only the actors being invisible, and present only as
voices.’ ‘Hali was also produced in India, (in) 1950 and 51.’30An allegorical
play, Hali is a presentation of everyman’s quest for fulfilment. The protagonist,
Hali, stands for humanity in both its male and female aspects. (It is significant
that as a child, Hali is named after a Muslim saint, but has long hair like a girl’s,
wears bangles and anklets and is also given a girl’s name, ‘Girija’). The boy,
losing his doting mother at an early age, makes early acquaintance with death.
Maya (Illusion) comforts him for a time. Later, as a young man he

briefly enjoys the felicity of love until Rooh, his beloved dies. Throughout,
Rahu, the dread spirit (literally, 'one who abandons’) tests him. In dreams and
visions, Hali realizes the essential truth of the human condition—that Man,
entrapped in ‘the snare of dreams’, in the sorrows of life, must ultimately accept
the fact that beauty and felicity are all too short-lived. Finally, Hali finds peace
in the thought that Man must transcend human love; go beyond life and death
and even leaving behind his limited idea of godhead, develop in himself a
godlike love and detachment. When the play ends, Hali has reached self-
knowledge, ‘the summit city’.

Hali has received extremely high praise from British critics, both for its thematic
richness and its style. It is, however, a moot point whether the hybrid and
tenuous mythology employed by Desani is an adequate vehicle for the existential
experience he has tried to express in the play. (Maya, Rahu and Isha are drawn
from Hindu mythology, while Hali himself is named after a Muslim saint as
noted earlier). The mingling of these disparate motifs has resulted in a physical,
not a chemical, mixture. This has inevifably affected the quality of the felt
experience which Hali tries to convey. The style undoubtedly has passages of
intensity but the ghost of faded romanticism always seems to be round the
corner.

Of Lakhan Deb’s three blank verse plays, Tiger Claw (1967) is a historical
drama dealing with the encounter between Shivaji and the Bijapur general Afzal
Khan, while Vivekanand (sic; 1972) and Murder At the Prayer Meeting (1976)
are chronicle plays, the latter dealing with the murder of Mahatma Gandhi.
Deb’s blank verse is competent, but some of the rhymed passages inMurder At
the Prayer Meeting employ atrocious rhymes like ‘Mahatma/Coma’, and
‘scruple/People’. Besides, the entire play, right from its title onwards, is a pale
imitation of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.

Other verse plays of the period include P.A. Krishnaswami’s The Flute of
Krishna (1950)—a dramatization of the legend of a girl and a youth who,
through their devotion to Krishna were transformed into the Lord’s flute and
cowherd’s staff respectively; M. Krishnamurti’s The Cloth of Gold (1951), a
dancedrama set in feudal times; Sadasbiv D. Rawoot’s Ioetic Plays: Immortal
Song, Karn[sic] and The Killers (1959); Satya Dev Jaggi’s The Point of Light
(1967) in verse and prose, which makes fun of both psychiatrists and Sadhus;
Pritish Nandy’s Rites for a Plebeian Statue (1969) in which the movement of the
free verse is more assured than the rather confused symbolism of the plot;
Hushmat Sozerokashme’s Vikramjeet (1970)— a sermon in verse on national
integration; Shree Devi Singh’s The Purple-Braided People (1970), a pageant of
Indian feudalism in its decay; P.S. Vasudev’s The Sunflower (1972) and S.
Raman’s Kama (1979).

The number of prose plays is naturally much larger. Indisputably the most
prolific Indian English playwright of any period is Asif Currimbhoy (1928—), a
business executive, who has, within a period of eighteen years beginning with
1959 written and published no less than thirty plays, the earliest of them being
The Tourist Mecca. Their range and variety of subject-matter are indeed
amazing. History and current politics; social and economic problems; the East-
West encounter; psychological conflicts, and religion, philosophy and art—
everything is grist to Currimbhoy’s dramatic mill.
The single largest group is that of-the plays dealing with recent political events
like the Partition and its aftermath (The Restaurant, 1960); the Sino-Indian
conflict (The Captives, 1963); the liberation of Portuguese Goa (Goa, 1964); the
coming of freedom to a tropical island in the Malaysian archipelago (Monsoon,
1965); the Indian freedom-struggle and the assassination of Gandhiji (An
Experiment with Truth, 1969); theNaxalite Movement (Inquilab, 1970); the
Bangla Desh War (The Refugee, 1971) and Sonar Bangla (1972); the Chinese
invasion of Tibet (Om Mane Padme Hum, 1972); the vicissitudes in the history
of Indo-China (Angkor, 1973) and the recent student agitation in Gujarat (The
Dissident M.L.A., 1974). Most of these plays have a strong ‘documentary’
element about them and there is no attempt to understand and project in dramatic
terms the ideological implications of the political conflicts dealt with. The
dramatist appears to be primarily interested in the thrill of the exciting events
rather than in the thought-processes which shaped them. The result is sheer
reportage; and when Currim- bhoy gives free rein to his imagination, the upshot
is often crude and contrived symbolism as in Goa, where Rose (‘Rose is Goa;
Goa is Rose’, is the slogan) is fourteen years old simply because Goa continues
to languish in slavery even after fourteen years of Indian Independence. The
characters are often unapologetic- ally one-dimensional—e.g. ‘Goan
Nationalist’, ‘Smuggler’ etc. and when they have names, they remain little more
than names.

The plays dealing with social problems betray the same inability to bring to bear
a strong creative imagination on issues, which are, on the other hand, treated in a
hopelessly superficial manner. The Doldrummers (1960), which won some
notoriety as it was banned for a time for alleged obscenity, is a study of young
Christian drop-outs living in a shack on a Bombay beach. Here again, the
emphasis appears to be more on the melodrama in the lives of the characters than
on any attempt to understand the nature of the forces which have made them
what they are. The Miracle Seed (1973), an extremely naive presentation of the
famine situation in Maharashtra, makes it abundantly clear that the dramatist
does not know his village at all.

The East-West encounter is the chief theme in The Tourist Mecca (1959), The
Hungry Ones (1965, 77) and Darjeeling Tea?(1971). Here also, what is offered
is a series of stereotypes (the Americans in The Tourist Mecca are too
‘American’ and the Russians too ‘Soviet’ to be authentic). The attempt to show
the ‘strange correlation between the yogic-beatnik of America and the
meditative-yogi in .India, between the Black Muslim of America and the Islamic
Muslim of Bengal’ in The Hungry Ones does not rise above the conventional,
which is also the case with the picture of the lives of British tea-planters in
Darjeeling Tea? The rich seasoning of melodrama is an additional irritant.

Among plays in which the emphasis is on psychological portrayal, The Clock

(1959) is an attempt to project the frustrations of a failed, middle-aged salesman.
In The Dumb Dancer (1961), a Kathakali dancer identifies himself so thoroughly
with his role of Bhima, the slayer of Dusshasana that he becomes mentally
deranged at the thought of his having become a murderer. Ironically enough, the
woman psychiatrist who treats him, becomes so strongly involved emotionally
with his problem that in the end, instead of curing him, she herself becomes
insane. This Alien .. . Native Land (1975) presents an Indian Jewish family
caught in the conflict between its historic connections with India and the call of
the newiy instituted Jewish State of Israel. Promising as these themes are,
Currimboy’s characters are too shadowy to sustain intensive probing, while his
penchant for melodrama dispels all hopes of subtlety of presentation.

The evolution of Hindu religion is the theme of OM (1961), described as a

trilogy, which actually contains only three acts. The subject does not lend itself
easily to dramatic treatment and the episodic structure only makes for expository
effect. Nor is the attempt to deal with the problem of the freedom of art in
Thorns on a Canvas (1962) more successful, owing to much confused
symbolism.

Ourrimbhoy’s fecundity is not thus attended by actual achievement

commensurate with it, though isolated scenes in his plays do give evidence of a
genuine dramatic talent. However, a woefully superficial treatment of promising
themes and pasteboard characters have given a general air of artificiality to his
work. His dialogue betrays extreme poverty of invention, since he appears to
forget that dramatic dialogue is not just an exact transcript of everyday speech,
but a technique of verbalization, which, while creating an effect of realism, goes
beyond mere reproduction of spoken language. His symbols are often crude,
conventional and machine-made but the greatest limitation of his technique is
revealed especially in his later plays, in which Currimbhoy appears to confuse
dramatic technique with theatrical trickery, and stage gimmicks with dramatic
experience. Plays like An Experiment with Truth, Darjeeling Tea? and Om
Mane Padme Hum require numerous shifts in time and place, flashbacks and
black-outs, dream-sequences and screen-shots and many other stage tricks. The
last mentioned play has a scene actually exhibiting the copulation between a
'beautiful aristocratic lady* and a ‘huge hairy monkey’, and another showing the
dismembering of a dead body ‘completely, limb by limb, into small pieces’.
Stage directions like ‘There is an indescribable expression on his face as he
enters the room’ (Goa, II ii), are hardly an aid to genuine drama. Unless
Currimbhoy realizes that drama is something more than simply play of lights,
plethora of sounds and parade of violence, all his enviable industry and
enthusiasm are unlikely to produce viable and worthwhile plays.

Of the plays of Partap Sharma (1940—), A Touch of Brightness (1968) was

performed on two continents abroad, but banned in Bombay for some time. A
picture of the Redlight district in Bombay, the play is to be commended for its
thematic boldness, which however, is marred by an obvious attempt to dish out
sensational superficialities to titillate a foreign taste. Slum, brothel and official
corruption; a temple dancer gone astray and a fake sadhu who at once quotes (or
to be exact, misquotes) the Gayatri mantra, and concocts spurious drugs for
venereal diseases—here is a typical mixture of garish colours for western
audiences fed on shows like Oh, Calcutta.

Sex is again the main theme in Shartna’s The Professor Has a Watery (1970), in
which young Virendra comes to know that he is an illegitimate child of a mother
raped successively by a Muslim and an Englishman, after having been dese/ted
by her lover, a Hindu professor. The symbolic use of the demon from the
Kathakoli dance to project Virendra’s mental conflict appears to be far-fetched,
in view of the context of the action, and finally, when Virendra and the Professor
kill each other little. more than melodrama s:ems to have been achieved.
However, Sharma shows a keen sense of situation and his dialogue is often
effective.

Nissim Ezekiel’s Three Plays(1969) includes Nalinl: A Comedy, Marriage

Poem: A Tragl-Comedyand The

Sleepwalkers: An Indo-American Farce.There is a skilful use of ironical fantasy

in these plays. In Nal.nl,the contrast between the real Nalini and the phantom
Nalini of a dream serves to expose the philistinism of the two young and
successful business executives, Raj and Bharat. Marriage Poempresents a middle
class bus

band caught in the cross-fire of marital duty and love; and The Sleepwalkers is a
diverting take-off on national preconceptions and prejudices. Ezekiel’s Song of
Deprivation (1969), a short play, has appeared separately. The plays are in a
minor vein, and it is to be regretted that Ezekiel has not followed them up so far
with any attempt at writing major drama, particularly because there is a keen
sense of the dramatic in some of his later poems.

Gurcharan Das’s Larins Sahib (1970) is a historical play, dealing with Henry
Lawrence of the Punjab. Das succeeds admirably in evoking the nineteenth
century colonial Indian background but his treatment of the protagonist’s
character has resulted in a blurring of focus, because the three separate avatars of
Henry Lawrence—viz., the enlightened empire-builder, the latter-day ‘Lion of
the Punjab’, and the little cog in the wheels of the East India Company machine
—are not properly integrated.

Das’s Mira (1969) has not yet appeared in print, while only Act I of his Kama
was published in 1974.31

Girish Karnad (19?8—), Kannada actor, director and playwright has translated
two of his plays into English: Tughlaq (1972) andHayavadana (1975). Tughlaq
is a historical play on the life of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq of the
fourteenth century India. Karnad projects the curious contradictions in the
complex personality of the Sultan, who was at once a dreamer and a man of
action, benevolent and cruel, devout and godless. His two close associates—
Barani, the scholarly historian and Najib, the politician seem to represent the two
opposite selves of Tughlaq, while Aziz, the wily time-server, Appears to
represent all those who took advantage of the Sultan’s visionary schemes and
fooled him. Karnad himself has suggested that he found ‘Tughlaq’s history
contemporary’31in that the souring of his idealism had a close parallel in the
mood of disenchantment of the sixties after the passing away of Nehru; and this
is another reason why the play was a success on the Kannada

stage. However, Tughlaq fails to emerge as a tragedy, chiefly because the

dramatist seems to deny himself the artist’s privilege to present an integrated
vision of a character full of conflicting tendencies.

Hayavadana is a bold experiment in the use of folk motifs, like the ‘Bhagavata’
narrator, masks, miming, the chorus etc. The story is taken from the ancient
Kathasaritsagara, though the immediate source is Thomas Mann’s version of it
in The Transposed Heads. The irony of the transposed heads on the bodies of
two friends, who stand at opposite poles of personality viz., the intellectual
versus the activist is employed here to raise the problem of identity. The sub-plot
of the man with a horse’s head, who achieves integration when he finally
becomes fully equine, brings out the contrast between the fundamental
simplicity and the essential complexity of animal and human life respectively.
Karnad does not succeed fully in investing the basic conflict in the play with the
required intensity, but his technical experiment with an indigenous dramatic
form here is a truimph which has opened up fresh lines of fruitful exploration for
the Indian English playwright.

Among other plays of interest may be mentioned V.K. Gokak’s The Goddess
Speaks (1948); B.S. Mardhekar’s Prometheus Rebound (translated by the author
from Marathi, 1950); K. Nagarajan’s Chidambaram: A Chronicle Play (1955);
M. Majeeb’sOrdeal 1857, (translated by the author from his Urdu original,
1958); V.D. Trivadi’s My Forest (1963); Santha Rama Rau’s A Passage to India
(1968), a dramatization of Forster’s novel; M.V. Rama Sarma’s Towards
Marriage (1954), The Carnival (1960),Sakuntala (1975) and The Mahatma
(1977); Husenali Chagla’s The Mussulman (1966) and The Director General
(1968); K.S. Rangappa’s Gandhiji's Sadhana (1969); M.D. Melwani’s Deep
Roots (1970); Dilip Hiro’s To Anchor a Cloud (1972) and two oneact plays:
Apply, Apply, No Reply (1977) and A Clean Break (1978); P.S. Vasudev’s Lord
Ravan of Lanka (1974); Shiv K. Kumar’s The Last Wedding Anniversary
(1975); K.A. Abbas and Pragji Dossa’s Barrister-At-Law: A Play about the
Early Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1977); Manohar Malgonkar’s historical play,
Line of- Mars (1978), and Syed Amanuddin’s The King who sold his Wife
(1978), which deals with the ancient legend of King Harischandra.

There are several other plays which have appeared in periodicals like Enact and
others. The Enact plays include Anil Saari’sIrefaces (1969); K.S. Rangappa’s T
ey Live Again (1969); Dina Mehta’s The Myth-Makers (1969); Mrinalini
Sarabbai’s Vichaar(1970); Kamala Das’s A Mini-Trilogy (1971); Madhu Rye’s I
Am a Butterfly (1974); Snehalata Reddy’s Sita (1974) and B. Narayan’s The
Onlookers (1975).

There are also a few plays which have been successfully produced but not yet
published, like Gieve Patel’s study of the small Parsi community, Princes
(1970). On the other hand, the number of minor plays (mostly first attempts) by
stray authors continues to be as large as in the previous period.
Prose
A large part of Indian English prose of the pre-Independence period was
inevitably political in character. With the attainment of Independence, the
‘overwhelming’ political question had finally been answered but fresh political
thinking continued to be provided by men like M.N. Roy, Jayaprakash Narayan
and R.M. Lohia. Their work has already been mentioned. Other types of prose
most of which had also flourished earlier continued to do so equally vigorously.
These .include autobiography and biography, historical and religious writing,
travelogue and prose of social criticism.

It is an interesting fact that all these different types of non- fictional prose have
been ably handled by Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897-), the most outstanding writer of
prose during the postIndependence period. His first literary effort, Defence of
India or Nationalization of Indian Army (19)5) is a noted study of military
organization in British India. This brief monograph for 73 pages is closely
argued and deals with questions such as the character, spirit and quality of the
colonial Indian army, the unjust recruitment policy and its harmful effects, the
need of Indianization and the mode of achieving it. It is, however, Chaudhuri’s
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) which is not only his most
characteristic and best work: it also contains all the basic ideas that have shaped
his highly individualistic world-view. The story of his development, as told here,
is that of a middle-class Bengali boy endowed with an acutely sensitive mind, a
restless spirit of enquiry, a strongly iconoclastic outlook, and encyclopaedic
interests—a boy who fell in love with England and Western civilization at a very
early age (The Autobiography is dedicated to ‘The Memory of the British
Empire in India.... All that was good and living within us was made, shaped and
quickened by the.. .British rule’). In spite of his great innate gifts, however,
Chaudhuri's life was one of failure until he won recognition as a writer quite late
in life. He himself confesses to a ‘malaise that has haunted me throughout my
life. During the years of my education I was becoming a stranger to my
environment and organizing my intellectual and moral life along an independent
nexus; in the next ten years I was oppressed by a feeling of antagonism to the
environment; and in the last phase I became hostile to it.’ It is possible to see in
this alienation the chief source of Chaudhuri’s highly unorthodox view of Indian
history and civilization. In the ‘Essay on the Course of Indian History’ at the end
of the Autobiography, Chaudhuri claims that ‘from the personal standpoint, this
historical thesis has emancipated’ him from his ‘malaise’; but the impartial
observer is likely to feel that it is the other way round, and that it is the ‘malaise’
that explains the historical thesis..

Chaudhuri’s thesis briefly is that Indian history comprises three cycles during
each of which a strong and creative foreign influence provided the primary
moiive force viz., the mid-European Aryan, the Muslim and the British,
respectively. But the Indo-Gangetic plain—‘the vampire of Geography*—with
its enervating extremes of climate and dulling flatness of topography every time
led to the degeneration of the invader. Writing in 1951, Chaudhuri prophesied
that T expect either the United States singly or a combination of the United
States and the British Commonwealth to re-establish and rejuvenate the foreign
domination of India.’

This extremist thesis appears very much like an intellectual extention of the
wish-fulfilment of a self-confessed Anglophile, alienated from his own culture
and at the same time all too conscious of the fact that the British empire had
conferred ‘subjecthood’ on him but had withheld ‘citizenship’. Chaudhuri claims
that the Autobiography is ‘more of a national than personal history’, but this
‘historical’ aspect is the least significant— though the most spectacular—
element in the book, which is at its best at the personal and social levels.
Chaudhuri’s self-portrait is all the more fascinating because the ‘unknown
Indian’ is so much of an ‘unusual’ Indian; and the picture of life in a small East
Bengal town in the early years of the twentieth century is drawn with many
evocative details. The historical thesis in the Autobiography has merely raised
the dust of controversy; it is the depiction of the man and his mise-en-scbne in it
that makes it one of the most remarkable examples of its genre in Indian English
literature.

A Passage to England (1959) was the product of a short visit to England in 1955.
This account of the ‘Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of Civilization’
constitutes a very unusual travel book. Chaudhuri’s self-stated aim here is ‘to
grasp... the reality I would call Timeless England, which I was seeing for the
first time, and which I was inevitably led to set against the Timeless India in
which I had been steeped all my life.’ However, the England Chaudhuri sees and
loves is not so much modern England, but anante-bellum, nineteenth century
England, of which he has been a devoted admirer all his life. This is clear from
the fact that his chapter on the Welfare State is the sketchiest; and when he
contrasts England with India (not exactly ‘Timeless India’, but the India of his
highly personal vision) all his pet prejudices have a field day. Chaudhuri’s best
insights are revealed when he comments on typical features of British character
such as ‘the inward classicism of the English people, who have two souls, one
northern and the other southern;’ ‘the eternal silence’ of the British crowds; the
Englishman’s ‘commercial honesty’, and his veneration for tradition. It is
obvious throughout that Chauduri looks at England with rose-tinted spectacles
and one will have to go to writers like George Mikes (whose humour Chaudhuri
lacks, though he is capable of irony and satire) for the other side of the shield.

The Continent of Circe: An Essay on The Peoples of India (1966) elaborates the
historical thesis already set forth in Chaudhuri’s Autobiography. The ‘vampire
of history’ of the earlier book now becomes, with a change of metaphor, the land
of the oriental Circe, which emasculates all immigrants. Chaudhuri again states
that ‘the Hindu is the European distorted! corrupted and made degenerate by the
cruel, torrid environment’ of India. His advice to his countrymen, therefore, is
‘Cease to think of yourselves as orientals. .. Say that we are Europeans in our
own right.' As for Chaudhuri himself, he has 'rescued my European soul from
Circe. . . I would save the fellow beasts. They do not, however, listen to me.
They honk, neigh, bellow, bleat or grunt, and scamper away to their scrub,
stable, byre, yen and sty.’ The book bristles with wild generalizations on
subjects such as history, politics, religion, culture and literature. For instance,
'life-long observation has convinced me that there is a streak of insanity in the
Hindu’ (Chaudhuri, one remembers, claims to be a Hindu, himself); India’s
liberation of Goa was ‘like Hitler’s occupation of Austria’; ‘there is no such
thing as thinking properly so called among the Hindus’; ‘Hinduism will never be
destroyed. , . but. . .what is surviving is only the ugliness of Hinduism’; Lady
Chatterley's Lover is an ‘outrageously low’ book, Lawrence being a
representative of a class of men, who in their writings, ‘satisfy a double passion:
lust and class-hatred.’

The thought in The Intellectual in India (1967) is much more balanced, if a trifle
too conventional by Chaudhuri’s standards. In his historical survey of his
intellectual traditions in India—viz., the Hindu, the Muslim, and the Indo-
European, Chaudhuri emphasizes the reformist zeal of the modern Hindu
intellectuals, the traditionalism of their Muslim counterparts and the derivative
and imitative element in the thought of the intellectuals of the modern Indian
Renaissance. This persistent psittacism is not the only failing of the Indian
intellectual today. Another is his alienation from the majority of the people, thus
leading to his alienation from his own culture. The temptation to slide into the
inviting grooves of careerism has also proved too strong for him. In suggesting
remedies for the situation, however, Chaudhuri rather unjustly equates the
intellectual with the writer—

and what is worse—with the Indian English writer alone. His summary dismissal
of all literature in the modern Indian regional languages as mere 'entertainmen'is
a typically Chaudhurian gesture.

Chaudhuri’s examination of Indian society and culture was continued further in

To Live or Not to Live (1972) and Culture in the Vanity Bag (1976). The aim of
the first book is to consider how we can have a happy social and family life
under the conditions to which we are born in this country.’ Chaudhuri finds
Hindu social life gregarious, noisy, lacking in privacy and leisure and destructive
of 'civilized mental communication. The segregation of men and women is a
further limitation. Family life—especially in the joint family—is also a bed of
thorns and a source of irritation and disappointment. The traditional system of
arranged marriages has become debased and hence unsafe. The qualities of a
good unitary family—viz., 'energy and animation’, ‘acquisition of interests'
andapositive and dominant tone' -are seldom in evidence now. Curiously

enough, in spite of his westernolatry, Chaudhuri disapproves of working women;

but on the whole, his criticism of Hindu society today is not totally unbalanced
here.

Indian clothing, through the ages is the theme of Culture in the Vanity Bag. The
book, an application of Chaudhuri’s favourite thesis on Indian history to sartorial
fashions, shows that both his Anglophilia and his Hindu-baiting continue
unabated. Obiter dicta like ‘India.. .is not a country in which a fusion of cultures
resulting in the appearance of a composite culture has ever taken place’; ‘the
strength of Hinduism lies in its unblastable inertia’; ‘the Gandhi Cap’ and ‘the
Jawahar waistcoat’ are ‘two of the ugliest imaginable adjuncts from non- Hindu
families of clothing’ are revealing samples.

Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Friedrich Max Muller (1974, Sahitya

Akademi Award 1975), ChS'udhuri’s first attempt at biography, is a curious
work, because there is obviously a yawning gap between the biographer’s and
the biographee’s attitudes to Hindu culture. It is indeed ironical that Chaudhuri,
the inveterate Hindu-baiter should write the life of a European who once
Sanskritized his name as ‘Moksha-mulara*. The upshot is a strange ambivalence
which ultimately makes the biography rather colourless. The book is thoroughly
researched and the characteristic Chaudhuri scholarship is unmistakably there;
what is missing, however, is a kind of intimacy and warmth which could only
have come if the writer and his sub- ject had not stood at opposite poles in
relation to ancient India.

Chaudhuri is naturally on far surer ground in Clive of India (l975)—a ‘re-

interpretation of the personality and achievements of Clive', which is perhaps the
most objective of this author’s works, though Chaudhuri’s admiration for Clive’s
spectacular rise and his commiseration for the sad last days and sudden death of
his hero are evident enough.

In contrast to this, Hinduism (l 979) is a sketchy and onesided presentation of a

subject to which Chaudhuri returns again and again. The historical account is
scrappy and the descriptive part makes too much of several taboos which are
only of peripheral significance; while the analytical part makes no attempt to
probe into the basic tenets of Hinduism and merely describes several cults. There
is also the usual quota of sweeping generalizations like ‘Hindu spirituality is a
pursuit, not of beatitude, but of power’ etc. The best part of the book is
Chaudhuri’s observations on Hinduism in Bengal.

Nirad Chaudhuri’s prose is a copy-book example of that overworked dictum,

‘style is the man.’ His learning, a mark of his insatiable intellectual curiosity, is
almost encyclopaedic. He seems to take ‘all knowledge’ for his province, and the
breadth of his interests, reminiscent of Renaissance Humanists, has few parallels
in an age of specialization, where a scholar appears to try to know more and
more about less and less. But a born rebel, he carries no learned lumber on his
back, for his ‘spirit of fierce intellectual defiance’ compels him to challenge all
accepted opinion. The largeness of his interests naturally makes for a largeness
of utterance and his periodic style is punctuated with quotations from several
languages and has an amazingly wide range of reference. His intrepid
unorthodoxy, however, ensures that there is no ponderousness, but an athletic
vigour instead. His eye for lively anecdote and homely parallel and his use of
irony and satire also lend trenchancy to his style. At the same time, the reader is
often irritated- by his intolerance, obstinacy and opinionatedness. In his weaker'
moments, he merely 270

offers conjecture, not theory, and elevates personal pique to the level of primary
principle. His thinking is time and again vitiated by extreme positions, blind
prejudices, half-truths and sheer sophistry. At his worst, he appears to have an
axe to grind, not an implement to open up new paths of thought; at his best even
when he may not enlighten the reader, Chaudhuri can certainly provoke, tease
and dazzle him.

Autobiography

Apart from The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, a number of

autobiographies by persons from different fields of activity were published
during this period. Among them are authors, journalists, artists, academicians,
politicians, men in public life, and civil servants, while there are not a few
women autobiographers also. Notable life-stories by authors are Harindranath
Chattopadhyaya’s Life and Myself, Vol. I: Dawn Approaching Noon (1948);
K..A. Abbas’s I write as I feel (1948) and I Am Not an Island (1976); Dom
Moraes’s My Son’s Father (1968); Ved Mehta’s Face To Face (1963); Sasthi
Brata’s My God Died Young(1967) and Confessions of an Indian Lover, first
published under the title, Confessions of an Indian Woman Eater (1973); Aubrey
Menen’s The Space within the Heart (1970) and R.K. Narayan’s My Days
(1975). Prabhakar Machwe’s From Self to Self( 1977) comprises the
reminiscences of a writer who wrote in three languages—Hindi, Marathi and
English.

Autobiographies by well-known journalists include Sachchi- danand Sinha’s

Recollections and Reminiscences of a Long Life(1950); A.S. Iyengar’s All
Through the Gandhian Era (1950); K. Rama Rao’s The Pen as My Sword
(1960); Prem Bhatia’s All My Yesterdays (1972); Frank Moraes’s Witness to an
Era (1973) and K.L. Gauba’s Friends and Foes (1974). Two noted artists talk
about their art in Ram Gopal’s Rhythm in Heaven (1957) and Ravi Shankar’s
My Music, My Life (1968) respectively. Academicians gone far afield are ably
represented in D.S. Sharma’s From Literature to Religion (1963) and D.C.
Pavate’sMemoirs of an Educational Administrator (1964) and My Days As
Governor (1974).

The number of autobiographies by men in politics and public life is very large.
These include Mirra Ismail’s My Public Life(1954); M.R. Jayakar’s The Story
of My Life (1958); N.G. Ranga’s Fight For Freedom (1968); A.K. Gopalan’s In
the Cause of the People (1973); Morarji Desai’s The Story of My Life (Vols. I-
III, 1974, 1979); A.S.R. Chari’s Memoirs of an Unrepentent Communist (1975);
C.D. Deshmukh’s The Course of My Life (1975); V.V. Giri’s My Life and
Times (1976); Goan freedom-fighter Telo dc Mascarenhas's When the Mango-
Trees Blossomed (1976); M.R. Masani’s Bliss Was in That Dawn (1977), K.M.
Panikkar’s Autobiography (1978) and M. Hid- ayatullah’s My Own Boswell
(1980). Hiren Mukerji’s Portrait of Parliament: Reflections and Recollections
1956-77 (1977) is interestingly reminiscential. Notable among memoirs by
diplomats are Sadath Ali Khan’s Brief Thanksgiving (1959); K.P.S. Menon’s
The Flying Troika: A Political Diary (1963); Many Worlds (1965);
andMemories and Musings (1979); M.R.A. Baig’s In Different Saddles (1967)
and Apa B. Pant’s A Moment in Time (1974). Those by eminent jurists include
M.C. Mahajan’s Looking Back (1963); M.C. Setalwad’s My Life: Law and
Other Things (1971); and M.C. Chagla’s elegantly written Roses in December
(1973). R.V.M.G. Ramarau, Prince of Pithapuram’s Of Men, Matters and
Me(1961) is remarkable for the candour with which the author describes how he
‘played with women as if they were toys.’ The exercise in dropping (many) a
brick is also at the heart of M.O. Mathai’s more recent Reminiscences of the
Nehru Age (1978) andMy Days with Nehru (1979). Indian civil servants and
other officials appear to have established a tradition of reminisoing after
reaching the haven of retirement. Prominent examples are M. Viswesvaraya’s
Memoirs of My Working Life (1951); Prakash Tandon’s vivid Punjabi Century
(1961) and Beyond Punjab (1971); Short Story writer S.K. Chettur’s Malayan
Adventure (1948),The Steel Frame and /: Life in the I.C.S. (1962) and The
Crystal Years (1964); E.N. Mangat Rai’s Commitment My Style (1973); R.P.
Noronha’s A Tale Told by an Idiot (1977); O. Pulla Reddi’s Autumn Leaves
(1979) and Mohan Mukerji’s Ham in the Sandwich: Lighter Side of Life in the
I.A.S. (1979). Krishna Sondhi’s Uprooted: An Inner Voyage to India's Past
(1977) is a sensitive document

Women autobiographers include Savitri Devi Nanda [A City of Two Gateways

(1950)—a picture of childhood in a Punjabi aristocratic family]; Brinda.
Mabarani of Kapurthala [The Story of An Indian Princess (1953)—a saga of
high life and not so high a sexual code]; Nayantara Sahgal, whose Prison and
Chocolate Cake (1954) and From Fear Set Free (1961) are warm studies of the
Nehru family; Sita Rathnamal, a tribal girl from the.Nilgiri hills, who wrote
Beyond the Jungle (1968)— a fascinating account of tribal life seen through the
eyes of an insider turned outsider; Kamala Dongerkery [On the Wings of Time,
(1968)]; Kamala Das, the poet, whose MyStory (1976) is in the same vein as her
confessional poetry; Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur (A Princess Remembers,
1976), and Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (mother of the novelist Santha Rama
Rau), whose An Inheritance (1978) reveals how a modern Indian woman can
imbibe the best in the West without sacrificing her oriental inheritance; and
Durgabai Deshmukh, whose Chintamani and I(1980) is a fascinating account of
the career of one of the most distinguished couples in modern Indian life.

A special mention must be made of Hazari’s An Indian Outcaste (London, 1951;

published in India under the title, / was an Outcaste, 1957). Hazari is the
pseudonym of Marcus Abraham Malik, the first man from the depressed classes
to write an autobiography.

Biography

The post-Independence Indian biographer naturally found a wealth of subject,

since finis had now been or was soon going to be written to the career of many a
stalwart of the freedom struggle. D.K. Roy’s Among the Great (1947) includes
assessments of Gandhi, Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. Iqbal Singh’s Rammohun
Roy appeared in 1958. Notable biographies of Lokmanya Tilak are those by
Ram Gopal (1956), D.V. Tam- hankar (1956), S.L. Karandikar(l957), Dhananjay
Keer (1959), G.P. Pradhan and A.K. Bhagwat (1959) and N.G. Jog (1963). The
most massive study of Mahatma Gandhi’s life is by D.G. Tendulkar—Mahatma:
Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi,

8 Vols., (1951-54). The numerous other biographical studies of Gandhi include

N.K. Basu’s My Days with Gandhi (1953), the lives by B.R. Nanda (1958) and
Hiren Mukherji (1960) and J.B. Kripalani’s Gandhi: His Life and Thought
(1970). Ved Mehta’sMahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (1978) and Manohar
Malgonkar’s The Men Who killed Gandhi (1978) are evidently journalistic in
spirit. The number of studies of Nehru is equally large and includes books by
D.F. Karaka (1953), Frank Moraes (1954), B.R. Nanda (1962) and M.
Chalapathi Rau (1973). The first volume of Sarvepalli Gopal’s comprehensive
Jawaharlal Nehru (Sahitya Akademi Award, 1976) came out in 1975 and the
second in 1979. Studies of other prominent political figures include Dhananjay
Keer’s Savarkar and His Times (1950) and Dr. Ambedkar: Life and Mission
(1954); S.A. Ayer’s Unto Him A Witness: The Story of Netaji Sublias Chandra
Bose In East Asia (1951), and N.G. Jog’s In Freedom’s Quest: A Biography of
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (1969); V.J. Patel’s Life and Work of Sardar
Vallabhbhai Patel (1958); Kodanda Rao’s The Right Hon. V.S. Srinivasa Sastri
(1963) and Feroz Chand’s Lajpat Rai (1978). Among other biographies may be
mentioned R.R. Diwakar’s Mahayogi: Life, Sadhana and Teachings of Sri
Aurobindo (1954); A.B. Purani’s Life of Sri Aurobindo (1960); K.R. Srinivasa
Iyengar’s Sri Aurobindo: A Biography and a History (2 vols., 1972) and On the
Mother (1952; revised and enlarged ed. 1978, Sahitya Akademi Award 1980);
Krishna Kripalani’s Rabindranath Tagore (1962), Gandhi: A Life (1968) and
Dwarkanath Tagore: A Forgotten Pioneer (1981); and Padmini Sen-Gupta’s
Sarojini Naidu (1965). The Builders of Modern India Serieslaunched by the
Publications Division of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting aims at
covering ‘all eminent national personalities.’ More than thirty volumes of
varying quality have come out so far in the series.

Politics and History

In contrast with the politics of the freedom struggle which produced an

impressive corpus of political writing, the politics of the Indian Sovereign
Democratic Republic has not produced many new political thinkers of note, the
most significant contribution still being by stalwarts of the previous age like
M.N. Roy, Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia, whose work has
already been noted. The Emergency of 1975-77 produced a spate of books, many
of them based on personal experience. Even the best of these like Ved Mehta’s
The New India (1978) are little better than ‘books of the hour’. Of the historians
whose first important studies appeared after Independence, D.D. Kosambi is
easily the most outstanding. A brilliant thinker interested in several disciplines
such as mathematics, genetics, archaeology, numismatics, Sanskrit textual
criticism and history, he adopts a modified Marxist point of view in his
Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956) and Culture and Civilization
of Ancient India in Historical Outline (1965). Dismissing ‘personal’, ‘episodic,
drum and trumpet’ history as ‘romantic fiction’, he views history as ‘the
presentation in chronological order of successive changes in the means and
relations of production.’

Among other historical works may be mentioned Romila Thapar’s Asoka and
the Decline of the Mauryas (1961) and A History of India Vol. I (1966).
Historical studies by creative writers include Manohar Malgonkar’s Kanhoji
Angrey: Maratha Admiral(1959) (reissued as The Sea Hawk: Life and Battles of
Kanhoji Angrey, 1980); Puars of Dewas Senior (1963) and Chattrapatis of
Kolhapur (1971)—books which again reveal bis gift as a narrator, and
Khushwant Singh’s eminently readable Ranjit Singh (1962) and A History of the
Sikhs, 2 Vols., 1963 and 1966.

Religion and Philosophy

As in politics, in this field too, there are few new writers whose work can rival
that of Radhakrishnan and others of the earlier period. Perhaps the most
remarkable contribution is by a savant whose poetry had already appeared
during the Gandhian age. J. Krishnamurti's The First and the Last Freedom
(1954), Life Ahead (1963), This Matter of Culture (1964) and The Awakening of
Intelligence (1973) represent the cream of his thought. The Penguin
Krishnamurti Reader (1970) and The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader
(1970) are handy selections. There are several collections of the discourses of
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh including From Sex to Super-consciousness(1977) and
The New Evolution of Man (1978). R.N. Dandekar’s Insights into
Hinduism(1979) is an important contribution to its subject. Notable among
writers on philosophy are T.M.P. Mahadevan (Gaudapada, 1954), T.R.V. Murti
(Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 1955), N.V. Banerjee (The Concept of
Philosophy, 1968) and Daya Krishna (Social Philosophy: Past and Future, 1969).

Literature of Travel, Essays and Belles-Lettres

Among the travel books of the period may be mentioned K.P.S. Menon’s Delhi-
Chunking: A Travel Diary(1947), Russian Panorama (1962) and China Past and
Present (1966); Santha Rama Rau’s East of Home (1950), This is India (1954),
View to the Southeast (1957) and My Russian Journey (1959); R.K. Narayan’s
My Dateless Diary (1960), an account of his visit to the United States of
America and The Emerald Route (1977), a description of the Karnataka land;
Sadhan Kumar Ghosh’s My English Journey 0961); Ved Mehta’s Walking the
Indian Streets (1963, rev. ed. 1975), and the more ambitious Portrait of
India(1970)—both well-written books, which, however, unmistakably betray the
alienation of the expatriate author; Dom Moraes’s Gone Away: An Indian
Journal (1960), The Tempest Within (1970), an account of East Pakistan in
1970, and A

Matter of People (1974), which describes a visit to twelve mostly undeveloped

countries to study ‘the population explosion’; John B. Alphonso Karkala’s
Passions of the Nightless Night (1974), which, in spite of its lurid title, is a sober
fictionalized account of a trip to Finland; K. Nagarajan’s Cauveri: From Source
to Sea (1975), a delightful medley of lyrical description, history, legend and
reflection; Khushwant Singh’s Around the World with Khushwant Singh edited
by Rahul Singh (1978); and F.D. Colaabavala’sAdventures of an Indian Tramp
(n.d.).
Some notable collections of essays are R.K. Narayan’s Next Sunday (1956), and
Reluctant Guru (1974), both illustrative of this author’s keen observation of men
and manners and his gentle irony. His Gods, Demons and Others (1965) is a

retelling of stories from Hindu mythology. The essays in N. Raghunathan’s

Sotto Voce: The Coming of Freedom (1959) and other collections first appeared
in journals. Ved Mehta’s Fly and the Fly-bottle: Encounters with British
Intellectuals (1963), The New Theologians (1966) and John is Easy to Please:
Encounters with the Written and the Spoken Word (1971) represent
contributions which appeared originally in The New Yorker. Armando
Menezes’s Lighter Than Air (1959) and Airy Nothings(1977) are collections of
gracefully written radio broadcasts. In his Mine Oyster (1968), Crisis of Crisis
(1972), Modern and Otherwise (1974) and Man and Society. As on a Darkling
Plain (1979) Sisir Kumar Ghose offers lively discussions of numerous subjects
ranging from American culture to spiritual life. V.V. John’s Light Luggage
(1969), The Orbiting Professor (1969) and The Great Class-room Hoax (1978)
offer witty fusi- lades on the Indian educational scene; and the breezy laughter of
Khushwant Singh’s India : A Mirror for its Monsters and Monstrosities (ed.
Rahul Singh, 1969), is typical of its author. Without Fear or Favour (1974) is a
selection from Frank Moraes’s articles. M.C.: Selected Editorials and Other
Writings of M. Chalapathi Rau (Compiled by Jag Mohan) and Magnus and
Musings: ‘Off the Record” Musings of M.C. (ed. Harindra Srivastava) appeared
in 1976 and 1980, respectively. Idylls Past and Present: An Editor's Wet Copy
(1979) is a collection of essays by and on another noted journalist—Pothan
Joseph, edited by Jaiboy Joseph.

Criticism

Several factors made for the growth of literary criticism after Independence. The
inception of a large number of new universities with departments of post-
graduate teaching and research naturally generated increased critical activity
(though not to the extent hoped for); and the consciousness of the newly
acquired national identity perhaps made for a greater degree of self-assurance
without which all attempts at critical evaluation are bound to be reduced to
dutiful echoes from foreign masters. Though even the most optimistic observers
will not claim that a specifically ‘Indian’ school of literary criticism has so far
emerged, not a little work of note has been done in several fields. The criticism
of Indian English literature especially appears to have received a fresh impetus
after Independence.
Of critical works on Sanskrit literature, Krishna Chaitanya’s A New History of
Sanskrit Literature (1970) provides a balanced literary evaluation of the entire
field, employing the modern critical idiom. R.N. Dandekar’s Vedic
Mythological Tracts (1979) is a collection of papers written over forty years.
Studies of individual authors and works include V.S. Sukathankar’s On the
Meaning of the Mahabharata (1957), V. Sitaramiah’S Vahniki Ramayana (1972)
and K. Krishnamoorthy's Kalidasa (1972). Among assessments of drama, G.K.
Bhat’s The Vidusaka (1959) and Tragedy and Sanskrit Drama (1974) are notable
Important studies in poetics and aesthetics are P.V. Kane’s History of Sanskrit
Poetics (1951), S.K. De’s Sanskrit Poetics as a study of Aesthetic(1963);
Krishna Chaitanya’s Sanskrit Poetics (1965) and K. Krishnamoorthy’s Studies in
Indian Aesthetics and Criticism (1979).

The Sahitya Akademi Series of Histories of Literature in the Indian languages,

of which more than ten have already been published ir an extremely useful
project. General studies of the literature in the several Indian languages include
Literature in Modern Indian Languages edited by V.K. Gokak (1957);
Contemporary Indian Literature: A Symposium published by the Sahitya
Akademi in 1957; Indian Literature: Short Critical Surveys of Twelve Major
Indian Languages and Literatures edited by Nagendra (1959); Sunitikumar
Chatterjee’s Languages and Literatures of Modern India (1963) and Indian
Literature since Independence: A Symposium edited by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar
(1973).

Among evaluations of the Indian theatre are C.B. Gupta’s The Indian Theatre
(1954); Drama in ModernIndia and The Writer's Responsibility in the Changing
World edited by K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar (1961); Balwant Gargi’s Theatre in
India (1962) and Folk Theatre of India (1966) and J.C. Mathur’s Drama in Rural
India (1964). There are also more specialized studies like R.D. Ranade’s
Pathway to God in Kannada Literature (1961), and assessments of individual
authors like S.C.

Sen-Gupta's The Great Sentinel: A Study of Rabindranath Tagore (1948), Sisir

Kumar Ghose’s Later Poems of Tagore(1964) and NihaTranjan Ray’s
Rabindranath Tagore (1968).

In the evaluation of British Literature, Shakespeare criticism is best represented

by S.C. Sen Gupta, whose Shakespearean Comedy (1950) and Shakespeare's
Historical Plays (1965) are well-known. Sitansu Mitra’s Shakespeare's Comic
Idea appeared in 1960. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s Shakespeare: His World and
His Art (1964) is a lucid survey. V.Y. Kantak’s perceptive critiques of
Shakespeare have appeared in Shakespeare Survey and elsewhere but he has not
attempted a book-length study. R.C. Sharma’s An Approach to King Lear (1975)
is a study in the Bradleyan tradition. R.W. Desai’s Sir John Falstaff, Knight
appeared in 1975. Outstanding examples of Milton scholarship are B. Rajan’s
Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader (1947) and Lofty Rhyme: A
Study of Milton’s Major Poetry (1970) ; M.V. Rama Sarma’s Paradise Lost: A
Study (1951); The Heroic Argument: A Study of Milton's Heroic Poetry (1971);
and The Eagle and the Phoenix: A Study of Samson Agonistes (1976) and A.G.
George’s Milton and the Nature of Man (1974). Neo-classicism has not received
much attention except in Sarup Singh’s The Theory of Drama in the Restoration
Period (1963), R.C. Sharma’s Themes and Conventions in the Comedy of
Manners (1965) and Tulsi Ram’s The Neo-Classical Epic (1971) . The
Romantics and the Victorians appear to be comparatively neglected, though
Amalendu Bose’s Chroniclers of Life: Studies in Early Victorian Poetry (1962),
A. A. Ansari’s study of Blake—Arrows of Intellect (1965) and O.P. Mathur’s
The Closet Drama of the Romantic Revival (1978) are notable studies.

In contrast, the twentieth century has received the most attention. T.S. Eliot has
invited the largest number of assessments—those by S.S. Hoskot (1961), A.G.
George (1962), C.T. Thomas (Poetic Tradition and Eliot’s Talent, 1975), J.
BirjePatil (Bener.th the Axle-Tree, 1977) and B. Rajan (The Overwhelming
Question, 1977) are general studies. On a more specialized nature are K.N.
Sinha’s On the Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot (1963); Rajendra Varma’s Royalist in
Politics: T.S. Eliot and Political Philosophy(1966); A.N. Dwivedi’s Indian
Thought and Tradition in T.S. Eliot (1977); V.K. Roy’s T.S. Eliot: Quest for
Belief (1979); M.K. Naik’sMighty Voices: Studies in T.S. Eliot (1980); Subhas
Sarkar’s T.S. Eliot: The Dramatist (1972) and K.S. Misra's Plays of T.S.
Eliot(1977). Among evaluations of W B. Yeats are Bhabatosh Chatterjee’s The
Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1962); H.R. Bachchan’s W.B. Yeats and Occultism
(1965); B. Rajan’s W.B. Yeats (1965); S. Mokashi-Punekar’s The Later Phase in
the Development of W.B. Yeats (1967) and The Later Poems of W.B. Yeats
(1973); Naresh Guha’s W.B. Yeats: An Indian Approach (1968); R.W.
Desai’sYeats’s Shakespeare (1971) and Ashok Bhargava’s The Poetry of W.B.
Yeats: Myth as Metaphor (1979). K.R. Srinivasa lyenger’s G.M. Hopkins: The
Man and the Poet appeared in 1948. Critical works on modern fiction include
Shiv K. Kumar’sBergson and the Stream of Consiousness Novel (1962),
Sisirkumar Ghose’s Aldous Huxley: A Cynical Salvationist (1962); V.A.
Shahane’s assessments of E.M. Forster (1962, 1975) and Rudyard Kipling
(1973); M.K. Naik’s W. Somerset Maugham (1966), and Studies ofD.H.
Lawrence by Chaman Nahal (D.H. Lawrence: An Eastern View, 1970),
Yudhisthir (Conflict in the Novels of D.H. Lawrence, 1968), and M.G.
Krishnamoorthy (The Tale as Medium—A Study of the Tales of D.H. Lawrence,
1972); K. Viswanatham’s India in English Fiction (1971), which covers authors
from Scott to Maugham, and G.K, Oas’s E M. Forster’s India(1977). Drama has
received less attention. H.H. Annaiah Gowda’s The Revival of English Poetic
Drama (1963, 1972), like hisDramatic Poetry from Medieval to Modern Times
(1971), is a competent survey. Among studies of individual dramatists may
specially be mentioned Saros Cowasjee’s Sean O ’Casey: The Man Behind the
Plays (1963) and A Study of Sean O'Casey(1966) and K.S. Misra’s The Plays of
J.M. Synge (1977).

Towards the end of the ’fifties American literature began to be studied more
intensively in Indian Universities. The establishment of the American Studies
Research Centre of Hyderabad in 1964; the number of scholarships, fellowships
and visiting lecturerships offered by the United States Educational Foundation in
India and the numerous conferences, senrnars and workshops in American
literature and history organised by it during the sixties and seventies gave a fillip
to American studies in India, the first fruits of which were collections of research
papers like Indian Essays in American Literature-' Papers in Honour of Robert E.
Spiller edited by Sujit Mukherjee and D.V.K. Raghavacharyulu (1969); Indian
Studies in American Fiction edited by M.K. Naik, S.K. Desai and S.
MokashiPunekar (1974) and Studies in American Literature: Essays in Honour
of William Mulderedited by Jagdish Chander and Narinder S. Pradhan (1976).
Considering the large number of Indian scholars trained in American literature,
their contribu- tion to its criticism is not yet as substantial as,could have been
expected. A.N. Kaul’s The American Vision: Ideal and Actual Society in
Nineteenth Century America (1962) is a perceptive general study. Critical woiks
on individual poets include V.K. Chari’s Whitman in the Light of Vedantic
Mysticism (1964); O.K. Nambiar’s Walt Whitman and Yoga (1966); Som P.
Ranchan’s Walt Whitman and the Great Adventure with Self (1967); T.R.
Rajasekhariah’s The Roots of Whitman’s Grass(1970) and V. Sachithanandan’s
Whitman and Bhdrati: A Comparative Study (1978). Inder Nath Kher’s The
Landscape of Absence (1974) is a critique of Emily Dickinson. Among studies
of novelists are K.B. Vaid’s Technique in the Novels of Henry James (1964);
D.S. Maini’s Henry James: The Indirect Vision (1973); Chaman Nahal’s
Narrative Pattern in Hemingway's Fiction(1971); K.M. Mutalik’s Mark Twain in
India (1977); Chiran- tan Kulshrestha’s Saul Bellow: The Problem of
Affirmation (1978) and S.T. Kallapur’s John Steinbeck (1978). D.V.K.
Raghavacharyulu’s Eugene O'Neill (1963), and N.S. Pradhan’s Modern
American Drama: A Study in Myth and Tradition (1978) are among the few
notable assessments of drama.

Growing interest in Indian English literature was another important feature of

the critical scene of the sixties and the seventies. Significant landmarks here are
the publication of K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar's comprehensive Indian Writing in
English(1962 and 1973) and two of the earliest collections of critical evaluations
—Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English presented to Armando Menezes
edited by M.K. Naik, S.K. Desai and G.S. Amur (1968, 72 and 77) and David
McCutchion’s Indian Writing in English: Critical Essays (1968). Since then
several general collections, surveys and studies of forms—especially fiction—
have appeared. The Twayne’s World Authors Series (New York) contains
critical assessments of individual authors and of the volumes in the Indian
Writers Series (Arnold- Heinemann, New Delhi) fifteen have already appeared.
The Bibliography appended to this history gives further details of criticism of
Indian English literature.

Theoretical criticism continues to be sparsely cultivated. Important contributions

are V.K. Gokak’s The Poetic Approach to Language (1952); An Integral View
of Poetry: An Indian Perspective (1975) and Coleridge's Aesthetics (1975);
Sadhan Kumar Ghosh’s Tragedy (1961); G.S. Amur’s The Concept of Comedy
(1963) and R.B. Patankar’s Aesthetics and Literary Criticism(1969). Prominent
examples of art criticism are V.S. Agrawala’s Gupta Art (1948) and Indian Art
(1965); Motichandra’s Technique of Mughal Painting (1949) and Studies in
Early Indian Painting (1974); M. Hiriyanna’s Art Experience (1954); S.N.
Dasgupta’sFundamentals of Indian Art (1954); Nandalal Bose’s On Art (1957);
C. Sivaramamurti’s Indian Sculpture (1961); South Indian Bronzes (1963) and
Nataraja in Art, Thought and Literature (1974); S.K. Saraswati’s Early Sculpture
of Bengal (1962); andComprehensive History of Indian Architecture (1979) and
Nihar Ranjan Ray’s Idea and Image in Indian Art (19731 and Maurya and Post-
Maurya Art(1975).

REFERENCES

1. David Selbourne, An Eye to India (Harmondsworth, 1977), passim.

2. George Woodcock, Faces of India (London, 1964), p. 100.

3. Arthur Ravenscroft, Introduction to Gabriel Okara's The Voice (London,

1964), p. 3.

4. Dorn Moraes. ‘Shall I paint myself White?’ Impact: Asian Views of the West,
ed. Jo Ann White (New York, 1971), pp.’l83-84. 5. Dom Moraes, My Son's
Father (tie'll Delhi, 1971), p. 162.

6. ibid., p. 164.

7. The Penguin Companion to Literature, Vol. I: British and Common wealth

Literature, ed David Daiches (Harmondswortb, 1971), p. 376. 8. Quoted by R.
Parthasarathy, Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets (Delhi, 1976), pp. 95-96.

9. Included in Perspectives ed. S.P. Bhagwat (Bombay, 1970), pp. 43-60.

10. R. Parthasarathy, ‘Talking and Reading Poetry: A Commentary on Rough

Passage', Expose, Madras, April 1978, p. 4.

11. R. Parthasarathy, Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, p. 74.

12. A.K. Mehrotra, ‘Replies to the Questionnaire’ in Modern Indian Poetry in

English ed. P- Lal, second revised and enlarged edition (Calcutta, 1971), p. 304.

13. Quoted by R. Parthasarathy, Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, p. 65.

14. Georges Simenon, Maigret's Memoirs, trans. by Jean Stewart (London,

1978), pp. 63-64.

15. ‘Literature and Social Reality’, The Aryan Path, XXVI, No. 9, Sept. 1955;
quoted by K.R. Chandrasekharan, Bhabani Bhattacharya, (New Delhi, 1974), p.
3.

16. Sudhakar Joshi, ’An Evening with Bhabani', The Sunday Standard, 27 April
1969; Quoted by K.R. Chandrasekharan, op, clt.

17. Manohar Malgonkar, ‘Purdah and Caste-Marks', The Times Literary

Supplement, 4 June, 1964, p. 491.
18. Khushwant Singh, Address to Expo 1967 Auditorium, Montreal, Canada,
1967; Quoted by V.A. Shahane, ‘Khushwant Singh: An Artist in Realism’,
Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English ed. M.K. Naik et at. (Dharwar,
1972), p. 333.

19. Iqbal Singh in Train To Pakistan (London, 1956), p. 126.

20. Shyamala A. Narayan, Sudhin N. Ghose (New Delhi, 1973), p. 12.

21. This has been pointed by Shyamala A. Narayan in her ‘Reality and Fantasy
in the Novels of Sudhin N. Ghose’, Aspects of Indian Writing in English ed.
M.K. Naik (New Delhi, 1979), p. 170.

22. G.V. Desani ‘A Marginal comment on the Problem of Medium in

Bicultures’, Paper presented at the European Conference of the Association for
Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Malta, March 1978, p. 5
(unpublished).

23. Ramlal Agarwal, Interview with R. Prawer Jhabvala, Quest, 91, Sept-
October. 1974, p. 36.

24. R.P. Jhabvala, Interview with Anna Rutherford, World Literature Written in
English, XVI, No. 2, November, 1976, p. 375.

25. Quoted by Jasbir Jain, Navantara Sahgal (New Delhi, 1978), p. 143.

26. Anita Desai, Interview with Yashodhara Dalmia, The Times of India, 29
April, 1979.

27. ibid.

28 S.V. Vasudev, *G.V. Desani’, The Second Writers Workshop Liter

ary Reader ed. P. Lal (Calcutta, 1973). p. 23.

29. Peter Russeil and Khushwant Singh (ed.), G.V. Desani: A Consid

eration of his Ail About H. Hatterr and Hali (London and Amster.

dam-C., 1932), p. 21.

30. ibid., p. 22.

31. In Opinion Literary Quarterly, Vol. I, Spring Issue, pp. 19-31. 32. Enact,
June 1971; Quoted by U.R. Anantha Murthy, Introduction

to Tughlaq (Delhi, 1972), p. viii.

CHAPTER 6

Retrospect and Prospect

As the nineteen seventies recede yielding place to the eighties, there could not be
a more suitable point of time for literary stock-taking. At the outset, it is
astonishing that doubts concerning the very raison d'etre of Indian English
literature are still being raised even after this-body of writing has been more than
a century and a half old and more. And a recent historian of Indian English
fiction has even prophesied that Indian English literature is dying and has also
predicted a possible date for its ensuing lamentable demise, which according to
her, will take place in the year 2,000 A.D.1 If Henry James found being an
American to be a 'complex fate’, being an Indian English, writer would appear to
be a far more complex destiny. There are, in fact, even today many, both in India
and abroad, who believe that Indian English literature is little more than an
exotic Indian dish fried in British butter, which, may serve to titillate a jaded
literary palate for a time by its outlandish flavour. According to this school of
thought, it is, at best merely a hot-house plant, a contrived thing which may, for
some time attract attention by its novelty, illustrating the logic of Dr. Johnson’s
well-known example of a woman’s preaching being 'like a dog’s walking on its
hinder legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ Such
misgivings are not entirely a new phenomenon. As early as 1895, we find R.C.
Dutt declaring, 'All attempts to court the Muses in a foreign tongue must be
fruitless.. . . True genius mistakes its vocation when it struggles in a foreign
tongue.’- More recently, we have Buddhadev Bose’s outright denunciation of
Indian English poetry as 'a blind alley lined with curio shops, leading nowhere.’

In the same year, M. Chalapati Rau improved upon this and dismissed the entire
Indian English literature in equally strong terms: ’Indian Writing in English is at
its best composition, and the best of it is translation. Nothing more is possible
except for some one who can live the language, think the language, and write,
not compose in, the language.' It has also been
reported that in the class-room of an American University, R.K. Narayan’s
fiction is being used to furnish sociological data rather than artistic material for
critical assessment.

Critics of Indian English literature have attacked it from different stand-points:

The simplest argument is that English is only an acquired language for most
Indians. Kailaspathy and Anantha Murthy have argued that ’English with most
Indians is still a language of official public affairs, of intellectual and academic
debate. They do not use English for their most intimate purposes, ”to think and
feel, bless and curse, quarrel and kiss.” ’* It is maintained, English is the living
speech of the people in countries like the United States, Australia and New
Zealand, in which a new national literature was and is being forged. English is
rooted in the soil there, and can therefore blossom forth, reflecting in its growth
the very peculiarities of the soil and the climate and the ethos of the people who
have sprung up from and returned to that soil. In contrast with this, English is
perhaps in the brain of the Indian, but not in his blood and bones.

John Wain even declares that ’Indian English, being a lingua franca, lacks the
fineness of the nuance that makes literature possible.... It is not a question of
“writing English like a native," because many Indians are native English
speakers, or nearly so. If English is not the language in which they lisp their first
words, it is still acquired very early. The question is, a native of where?’

An answer to this question will perhaps be found in the distinction made by

Professor Paul Christopherssen, between a foreign language and a second
language. The former is: 'a language which is not one’s own, though one may
have a good knowledge of it; a second language is a language which is one’s
own, though not one’s first in order of importance, nor usually, the first to be
learnt. A foreign language is used for absorbing the culture of another nation; a
second language is used as an alternative way of expressing the culture of one’s
own.’7

In the case of at least some Indians, English has always been ‘a second
language’ in this sense and they have naturally used it for expressing themselves
creatively. In fact, until recently— and this is true of many even today—the
educated Indian wrote his letters in English, used English at work and play and
acquired it so perfectly that it often became a verbal skin, rather than a coat. As
Sri Aurobindo puts it, ’It is not true in all cases that one can’t write first class
things in a learnt language.’8 The example of Conrad, who learnt English at the
age of twenty-six comes to mind immediately. He wrote, ‘My faculty to write in
English is as. natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born....
Its very idioms, I truly believe, had a direct action on my temperament pnd
fashioned my still plastic character.... If I had not written in English, I would not
have written at all.’*

Vladimir Nabokov wrote eight novels in Russian, turned to English at the age of
forty and wrote eight novels in this language, including Lolita. And in our own
generation, the ambidextrous Samuel Beckett has, by this example, again shown
that creatiye effort is possible for a writer in more languages than one. But
perhaps the best argument in support of Indian English literature is the fact that
the best in it has been taken seriously and subjected to minute appraisal by critics
in both India and abroad. Surely, the sensibility of men like E.M. Forster and
Lawrence Durrell, Graham Greene, William Walsh and Jack Lindsay in the west
and Srinivasa Iyengar and V.K. Gokak in the east cannot be said to have
suddenly undergone a complete critical paralysis when confronted by Indian
English literature, for they have all appreciated the finer things in it. And even
the most touchy Indians will have to concede that not all the Western praise is
mere patronising, nor all the Indian commendation brazen salesmanship. Again,
the proof of the success of Indian English literature is its success. The steady
interest it has roused, in recent years, in English-speaking countries shows that it
has merits other than those of sheer novelty and exoticism.

Another oft-repeated charge against Indian English literature is that its

practitioners wrote with an eye on the foreign reader and hence try to provide
stereo-types of both character and situation, which attract this reader. Like
Benjamin Franklin's famous recipe for a New England elegy, the recipe for a
successful Indian novel in English is, according to these critics, now very well
patented. Take an assortment of sadhus, fakirs, maharajas, agitationists,
Westernized Indian men and traditional Indian women—either pious paragons or
seductive sirens according to your mood and choice—and let them perform
against the background of communal riots and nationalistic uprisings; throw in a
couple of tiger-hunts, rope-tricks, snakes and elephants; and a pinch of
mysticism if you can carry it olf successfully—and there you have your Indian
English masterpiece. While it is true that this description does lit at least some
Indian fiction in English with more or less aptness, it would be patently unfair to
dismiss the best work of novelists like Nara- yan, Anand and Raja Rao in these
terms. It would be like condemning all fiction in English as cheap, taking
circulating library novels and pulp magazines as the only evidence admissible.
‘Agreed,’ (somewhat grudgingly) says the critic of Indian English literature, ‘but
why can’t the Indian writer write in his mother tongue? Why must he choose an
alien language, which hardly two per cent of his own countrymen understand,
and which is very soon to go the way all Englishmen went thirty years ago?’
Presiding over the fifth All India Writers’ Conference in 1965, Mr.
Sacchindananda Vatsyayan, a noted modern Hindi writer, launched a scathing
attack (in masterly English) on Indian English literature. He dubbed its
practitioner ‘a secondclass brother’ and ‘a poor relation’ and concluded, ‘To be
Indian as a writer is first and foremost to write

Indian, to write in an Indian language.... To be Indian

must mean giving expression to what is unique in our experience-. . . India

cannot have a literature—I mean a great literature and pne in which her spirit
will find expression-r-except in an Indian language.’10

Two answers are possible to the question, ‘Why does the Indian English writer
prefer English to his mother tongue?’ In the early phase of this writing, perhaps
the motive was predominantly practical. The Indian wanted to be heard by his
English masters. Writing at the turn of the century, Babu Sambu- nath
Mukherjee said it in so many words: ‘We might have created one of the finest
literatures in the world without making any impression in the camp of our
British rulers, and, of course, without advancing our political or even social
status. Hence we are compelled to journalism and authorship in a foreign tongue,
to make English a kind of second vernacular to us. You have no idea of the
enormous personal sacrifice involved in this. . . . But we who write in English
have to make this sacrifice for the fatherland.’11

Sacrifice always brings its rewards, as Hindu tradition has it. Soon, the Indian
came to realize that he could combine business with artistic pleasure by writing
in English. The practical motives are still relevant. There is plenty of ivory in
India, but the ivory tower is not the home and habitat of the Indian writer. He
knows that by choosing to write in English he can reach a far wider audience
than he can muster if he expresses himself in his mother tongue. He also knows
that the Indian (who, according to Westerners, talks too much, too fast and too
loud) has a ‘tongue’ for languages and that a stroke of historical providence has
placed into his hands an instrument of expression which is one of the most
supple and pliant that civilization has so far produced. Furthermore, modern
India represents, to a large extent, a synthesis of East and West, for we have
taken and assimilated much from the West, while retaining, rediscovering and
reclaiming much that has always been our own. This synthesis and its experience
can be adequately expressed in Indian English literature, which itself represents
part of this process. M.E. Derrett convincingly argues: ‘Because of their first-
hand experience of the West, they (i.e,.

Indian writers in English) have the power to perceive differences; they have
experienced the oriental’s adjustment to a western society and re-adjustment
again to the oriental, and from this they have a slightly detached view of their
own society—not the detached and slightly repellent view of the deIndianized
Indian. They must feel a sense of release in expressing their sensations, which
after all demand expression and as one writer expresses it: “Since we cannot
expect others to try to understand our achievement in our own terms, we have to
present it in a language which they (the West) can understand.”

Champions of the mother tongue are not, however, so easily convinced.

Maintaining that ‘some of the works of R.K. Narayan well received in the west...
are not too well received when translated by him into Tamil and by others into
Kannada,' A.K. Ramanujan asks, ‘Is this to be accounted for by reference to the
readership they then obtain, the linguistic style, or is the endproduct the
expression of a “sub-culture?”

M.G. Krishnamurthy goes a step further and claims that the Indian writer in
English has the dice heavily loaded in his favour, right from the start: ‘Since
English has developed in a “non-Hindu” cultural complex, certain details,
stereotypes and even words and phrases when skilfully employed can trigger
into existence a non-English culture. For instance, Narayan’s bare descriptions
of a middle-class south Indian household, Raja Rao’s use of Sanskrit words and
phrases and direct translations of Kannada idioms, and Nagarajao’s descriptions
of the temple.. .do much more for their novels than they can for the novels of
one writing in an Indian language. I don’t think anyone would get excited when
he comes across the word “Ganga” or a Sanskrit sloka in a novel in one of our
languages. But when we come across these in Raja Rao or when he uses the
phrase “Little Mother” something seems to happen to an Indian reader. An
uncomfortable question—Do we respond to these words and phrases the way we
do because of “the shock of recognition” or because we are, in subtle ways, so
alienated from our own culture, that. . .we can recognise the value of a native
culture only when it is distanced from us?’14
This is an extremely clever line of argument. Unfortunately, it seems to be
vitiated by a totally misleading first premise— that style in Indian English
literature is a matter of certain tricks and gimmicks to be used for certain effects
in certain ways. If the Indian writer in English gains certain special effects by the
very fact that he is expressing an essentially Indian experience in a foreign
language, they are inevitable concomitants of his peculiar situation which he has
to accept with all its advantages and limitations. On the other hand, the writer in
the mother tongue will have his own strong points and their consequent
restrictions too.

The Indian writer in English can justify his existence—he must live, though
some may not see the necessity, to adapt the words of a character in a French
farce in another context—by being wholly and truly himself. He (or she) must
not try to be ‘Matthew Arnold in a saree’ (in Gordon Bottomley’s famous
phrase), or a Shelley in a salwar, or a Byron in a burkha or a Lawrence in a
iungi, or a Joyce in jodhpurs or a Babu Beckett. As this History shows, there was
a time when he did try to be these, when he did content himself with shoddy
imitation.

But it would be patently unfair to maintain that he never developed any further.
In fact, the course of Indian English literature is an absorbing record of the
steady march of the Indian writer in English from sheer psittacism to authentic
literary expression. Far from remaining merely ‘bastard bantlings of the British’,
Indian English writers, struggling valiantly against prejudice, neglect and
ridicule, have, at their best, proved themselves to be proud heirs to the two
equally rich worlds of the East and the West. Perhaps the finest answer to those
who question the very raison d'etre of Indian English literature has been given by
Kamala Das:16

Don’t write in English, they said,

English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave Me alone, critics, friends,
visiting cousins, Every one of you? Why not let me speak in Any language I
like? The language I speak Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses, All
mine, mine alone. It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,

It is as human as I am human. ..

It voices my joys, my longings, my

Hopes. .. It

Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is

Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and

Is aware.

As for the future, in what direction Indian English literature is going to develop
may best be left for time to unfold. With the almost unlimited lease of life given
to English in India today and the consequent increase in readership, and with the
growing interest in Commonwealth literature in the West recently, reports of the
impending demise of Indian English literature would appear to be ‘greatly
exaggerated’. Literary forecasts are not less unreliable than weather forecasts
and the historian need not rush in to make either Micawberish prophecies or
Cassandralike predictions. He may, however, be permitted to hope (being
human) with Henry Derozio, the first Indian English poet, who told the youth of
the Hindu College in the early years of the Nineteenth century:14

I see

Fame in the mirror of futurity,

Weaving the chaplets you are yet to gain.