CHALAPATHI RAU
Dr. K. R. SRINIVASA IYENGAR
The recent death of M. Chalapathi
Rau–under such extraordinary circumstances too!–must have come as a shock to
his innumerable friends and admirers, as it certainly did to me. Our
association was spread over half a century, and at our last meeting in my house
in Mylapore in mid-1982, his intellect was at its
liveliest, and there was no dearth of plans for the future. He seems to have
written to his brother, M. R. Rao, as late as 17 December 1982:
“Waltair, I know,
will be my final home but not yet. I would be there, retiring from retirement,
in sound health, not as a cripple or too old.”
And, again, on 10 February 1983:
“I may be here (
But Destiny has disposed otherwise. The race
is run, the gallant heroic soul has passed away.
What can I say about Chalapathi
Rau today when the mind is crowded with a miscellany of memories–when
the heart is weighted with sadness–and a mere numbness creeps upon the
consciousness?
It is our inveterate habit to return to the
days of our youth – “the days
of our glory,” says Byron! – in a mood of irrational yet inescapable
nostalgia. Where exactly was the glamour or the glory of those days? One was an
articled slave to a soulless curriculum–one’s purse was almost always empty–one spasmodically alternated between hope and despair–one was just a speck of insignificance in a spiralling dust-storm. And yet–how did we manage the daily miracle?–one felt with Wordsworth that “to be young
was very heaven!” One could sip coffee (priced one anna
per cup) with sly disdain and annihilate whole worlds with an impromptu
epigram, or indeed even with a mere shrug of one’s shoulders. One could saunter
along the
In 1931, I was a “private” post-graduate
student, rooming in Sri Venkateswara Hostel, Triplicane, spending several hours a day in the Madras
University Library, trying unsuccessfully to tackle Beowulf, feeling
half-reputed by its barbaric grandeur, and thus discovering an easy reason to
browse among books of all kinds putting out of my mind inconvenient thoughts of
the approaching
I met Chalapathi
Rau in Triveni office, which used to be located in the YMIA building.
Writing of “Old Triveni Days” in January 1955, Chalapathi
Rau himself recalls: “I was introduced to him by Isvaran,
over the noise of a ‘Kalakshepam’ in the auditorium.”
In whichever way our friendship began, it was to endure and to contribute in no
insignificant measure to that elusive thing we call the quality of life. The
editor of Triveni, K. Ramakotiswara Rau, was suave, reticent, genial,
and managed to conceal somehow what an effort it cost him to keep the journal
uneasily afloat on India’s cultural waters. “Ramakoti”
was also a literary “midwife” – as K. S. Venkataramani
often called him – finding pride and delight in the discovery of “new” writers. Certainly,
he discovered and launched Chalapathi’s first piece,
an appreciation of the new Poet Laureate, John Masefield.
Recalling the event a quarter-century later, Chalapathi
was to write:
‘I
had seen Triveni but today I was meeting its Editor, and it seemed a
moment on which somebody’s destiny depended. He would be kind, but would he
have the pleasure of discovering me, I who was well-known to myself?
He was considerate...He said kind things,
something about the raciness of the writing...It was only when the article was
published that I realised that the writing had been
too racy, a tumble of similes and metaphors, racing beyond the point of no
return...With twenty-five neatly printed reprints, I felt I was a writer.”
Chalapathi and I were both contributors to the journal,
we were both in Madras during 1931-’33, and that was kinship enough to begin
with. We met and talked, – oh,
thought is free! Manjeri S. Isvaran,
poet and short-story writer, was one of us too, and he was serious and sad, the
very picture of Arnold’s The Strayed Reveller. A.
D. Mani, as yet unaware of the burden of Hitavada’s editorship, shot in and out of the
office of Triveni, now with the proposal to open a branch of the PEN in
Madras, now presenting us with a fait accompli in the shape of a
“Renaissance Association.” And there was K. Chandrasekharan, humanist,
advocate and author of a collection of portraits in miniature, Persons and
Personalities. A couple of decades later, I wrote an essay “We Were Seven”
for the Social Welfare of Bombay recalling this group of seven writers
who came together under the aegis of Triveni in the early
nineteen-thirties.
At the beginning of our acquaintanceship, Chalapathi seemed a lazy, easy, care-free sort of person.
But there was more to it than the seeming, for one felt also that there behind
them all, lay, resilient and curled, a steely nimbleness and a steely
sharpness. “Let’s go to the Restaurant”, he would say suddenly; “Let’s’ have a
classical triad–a sweet, a savoury and a cup that
cheers!” And there, over a cup of coffee, he would warm up and expand and
scintillate. We discussed men and affairs, politics, and literature, virtues
and idiosyncracies. Chalapathi
was a little bit of a cynic – Lytton Strachey would
have said that he was great enough to be that – and this fact (or this
appearance) imparted a piquant flavour to all he
said. Returning to his room, I once more scanned the walls, and I read aloud
the familiar lines of Aldous Huxley’s Fifth
Philosopher’s Song:
A million million
spermatozoa,
All of
them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope
to survive.
And among the billion minus one
Might have
chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne–
But
the One was Me.
Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
Taking
ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, forward Homunculus,
If you’d quietly died!
Chalapathi had transcribed the whole poem in his
characteristic bold hand and hung the paper prominently. Is the Fifth
Philosopher’s Song the quintessence of pessimism – or is it rather the stormblast
prelude to frenzied striving and self-exceeding? Perhaps it is both.
Chalapathi Rau was a close student of modern English
literature, especially poetry. His table used to be littered with Benn’s Sixpenny Poets – Edward Thompson, John
Davidson, Waiter de la Mare, and several others. The books were heavily
underlined, and he could recite verses with a peppery naturalness and relish.
As for fiction, we talked of Cronin and Golding and
Lawrence and Francis Brett Young, and brought in the more recent poets– “Modernists, Imagists, and Futurists” about
whom he had written scintillatingly in Triveni. In a word, we were
young, and we loved English literature.
It was indeed extraordinary that at a time
when academic surveys of English poetry were apt to stop with Swinburne, Chalapathi should have
exposed himself so enthusiastically to the “modernists, imagists and futurists”–to Edith Sitwell,
to Aldous Huxley, to Ezra Pound, and even to T. S.
Eliot, of whom he could write superlatively in these terms:
“...the most
scholastic of poets and critics ... The
Sacred Wood has already become the Bible of critics who
follow him, while The Waste Land is one of the great poems of the
world...and in its discords, its weird music, its undying images, and the hush hush hush of its silences, it
suggests the very stir of stars, the rustle of planets, and the crash of
worlds.”
But Chalapathi’s
addiction to English poetry didn’t estrange him from Telugu poetry, and one of
his pioneering pieces of criticism-cum-translation was “Subbarau’s
Yenki Songs.” This thin little volume
of songs, that had the gusto of ballads and the stately lilt of lyrics”, he wrote, “came upon us like the
light of a new experience.” The sahridaya
is in close alliance with the student of English poetry when Chalapathi writes (Triveni,
Nov.–Dec. 1930):
“It introduced the same problems in Telugu
poetry as Wordsworth had introduced a century ago in England with his ‘Lyrical
Ballads’, the same important problem of the subject-matter of poetry and the
language of poetic expression. The songs introduced a new genre in love-poetry
in Telugu...” At the beginning of 1933, I chanced upon Chalapathi
Rau in the Welcome Hotel of Bombay. He had not quite made up his mind what he
was going to do with himself, but he vaguely hoped to join a firm of solicitors
in Madras. I had myself gone to Bombay to take an interview in connection with
a teaching post in a college to be soon started, and Chalapathi
advised me to shed my bohemianism and become a good boy. In plainer language,
he advised me to accept the offer of the teaching job at Belgaum.
Well, I followed his advice,–but
that is quite another story. After that brief encounter at the Welcome Hotel,
thirty-three years were to pass before we could see each other in the flesh
again. But that hardly mattered. I knew of his movements from common friends–Venkataramani, Isvaran – and, of course, I read his occasional
articles in Triveni. There was his obituary tribute to G. K. Chesterton
in the August 1936 number of Triveni, and he found the right words more
than once:
“His verse, when it is not mere satire or
tinselly, is the most powerful
part of his output; in its intensity of tone, it thrills with meanings, and in
its sweep of imagination it is capable of surprising crescendoes
of fervour and music...
“He will last as a great master of the essay,
as a penetrating literary critic, as a vigorous verse-satirist, as a poet,
above all as a personality. If he was the enemy of salutary things like Divorce
reform, he was also the enemy of hypocrisy. If he was obscurantist at times, he
was also gloriously illuminating. He
was never a cad or a poseur.”
But, of course, it was political writing that
caught one’s attention at once. He wrote of “The Viceroys of India” and made
even that stalest of themes interesting and enjoyable. Far more to the purpose
was “A Decade of Indian Politics” (Sept-Oct. 1934), in which Chalapathi lashed out against the new Constitution, the
joint handiwork of Hoare, Sapru
and Bikaner:
“What must be clear to all is that the Native
States will be the pocket boroughs and, the communal electorates the rotten
boroughs which will return a surplus of reactionaries, so that it will be well
nigh impossible even to move this Car of Juggernaut...
“If the Congress cannot do anything else, it
might at least take effective steps to kill this hydra-headed monstrosity, this
patchwork Constitution of a mob of Princes and a motley of Provinces,
with self-government on the circumference and safeguards at the centre...”
Sapru, however, was to warn Tiresias-like:
If we don’t agree to work it (the Constitution), it will work us!
Then, one day, I learned that Chalapathi Rau had gone to Allahabad,
and that my friend, Iswara Dutt,
and he were running the Week-End
and the Twentieth Century. Soon after, in 1937 on the eve of the
provincial elections (under the new Constitution), Iswara
Dutt and Chalapathi
descended upon Madras, and ran the daily paper, People’s Voice, on
behalf of the Raja of Pithapuram whose newly-found
party entered the fray with inflated hopes and ample funds. The party was
routed at the polls, and the paper folded up; but Chalapathi
Rau had had his editorial innings, and the transition from Pithapuram’s to Jawaharlal’s
politics – for in August 1938, Chalapathi joined Nehru’s paper,
the National Herald – was
a tonic change and a singular piece of good fortune to the country. Chalapathi’s oscillations and meanderings in the journalistic
world hadn’t apparently been in vain. He had acquired a prose style full of
iridescent flashes with a cumulative aurora borealis power of fascination. He
could, with hardly more than a dozen sharp phrases, “flay alive” either a
pompous popular idol or a soulless Simla bureaucrat.
No wonder Chalapathi fitted into the scheme of the National
Herald to a nicety. The editor K. Rama Rao and his deputy, Chalapathi, were complementary to each other, and together
they made a very formidable combination. But the partnership ended in 1946,
and Chalapathi became the new helmsman and remained
in that post for the next thirty years and more.
In the early nineteen-sixties, I had a
postcard from Chalapathi–breaking the silence of many long years–telling me how he had met my son, Ambirajan, at the British Museum in London, and had found
him thriving. Then, in 1966, Chalapathi called on me
at Waltair, in the Andhra University campus. Thirty-three years after! We had both changed a
great deal, but the deeper
affinity remained. I met him, over a decade later, in his National Herald office
during the Emergency. “Do you see any prospect of things improving?” I asked.
“I’m working for it, I’m hoping for it,” he said. That must have been a
difficult time for him, but he kept his heart warm and his head cool and his
vision unblurred. Once, dining at the Delhi Branch of
Sri Aurobindo Ashram with Acharya Kripalani
during the Emergency, I asked him how it was that one of his outspoken
“Letters” achieved publication in the national press; he answered with a
quizzical smile: “This was how it happened, Professor. Chalapathi
Rau was bold enough to publish it in the National Herald first, and once
that happened, the other papers fell in line.” But clearly Chalapathi
wasn’t happy during the Emergency, and even afterwards, he wasn’t the same man
again. Something had gone out of him, as it were. He had almost to speak in
sighs and silences.
It was, however, during the Emergency that by
a quirk of fate we were both nominated members of the Governing Body of CIEFL,
Hyderabad. This gave us opportunities to meet 3 or 4 times a year, a couple of days every time, in the CIEFL
campus. In the evening of our lives, it was thus possible for us to indulge in
“the remembrance of things past”, balance national disappointments against
achievements however flawed or partial, and give free vent to hope even against
hope. Chalapathi’s last years were clouded because of
the conspiracy of circumstances that forced him to leave the National
Herald, and also because of the decline of values in divers segments of our
national life. Writing in Triveni in June 1938, Chalapathi
said, more in anguish than in anger, and still with a residual hope though not unassailed by a sense of despair:
“The ego of the nation must be developed ...
There must be unity, concentration and point in that ego...
“We may love English poetry, but we cannot
but hate the bacilli processes of British imperialism. And, after all, is not Gandhiji’s own illumination due to his incandescent
introspection? And what is introspection but the inquisition of the soul? The
nation must pass through this fit of severe self-scrutiny. It must impose on
itself this grand inquisition...There seems to be no easy path for its
salvation...”
I wonder whether these words wrung from the
depths aren’t even more applicable today than 45 years ago, when they were
written.