Towards an Image of
D.
ANJANEYULU
Raja Rao and Nirad Chaudhuri. At first sight, one
cannot possibly think of a more unlikely pair of Indian writers for comparison
or for contrast. Except for the historical fact that both happen to be born
Indian and both are writers, there seems little or nothing in common between
them. May be also that both write in the English language, primarily if not
exclusively. Roughly, they can be described as contemporaries, though Chaudhuri is nearly a decade and a half older than Raja
Rao. But there the comparison, such as it is, seems to end.
Raja
Rao has been essentially a fiction-writer, mainly a novelist and secondarily a
short story writer. That is where his reputation rests, or rested until
recently. Of late, however, he has cast himself (or at any rate circumstances
have cast him) in a new role as a teacher of Indian philosophy and culture at
the
Starting
as a freelance journalist, Nirad Chaudhuri
tried his hand at quite a few things including ghost-writing for a political
leader and script writing for All India Radio and finally settled in the latter
part of his life as a full-time author of books. He is credited with the
intellectual resourcefulness of a man on flying trapeze, working for the
British war propaganda machine by day and supplying verbal ammunition for Sarat Bose by evening and night as his private secretary
during the second World War. This is an achievement,
comparable (for nimbleness of wit and flexibility of conscience) to that of the
sub-editor in C. E. Montague’s A Hind Let Loose. He could be classified
as a discursive writer, with a wide range of intellectual interests. He made
his debut in authorship as an autobiographer and has recently
qualified himself as a biographer as well (of Max Mueller). It would be safer
to treat him as a social commentator rather than as a sociologist, a student of
history rather than a historian right and proper. He is really a creative
writer and it is as a creative writer that he should stand or fall.
Both
Raja Rao and Chaudhuri can legitimately claim to be
much better equipped in their respective fields of special interest than many
of their colleagues in the writing profession, often found to be more popular
and successful than either of them. For one thing, their range is wider. In the
case of Raja Rao, it extends from the Vedas and the Upanishads to the Christian
heresies of medieval Europe and from the Sanskrit poets and Kannada Vachanakaaras to the French masters from Pascal and Voltaire
to Velery and Malraux.
In
the case of Chaudhuri, his range is known to be encyclopaedic in more senses than one. He is a proud
devotee of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in
his striving to acquire a certain thoroughness in his
knowledge of things. From problems of defence in
For
another, their depth of understanding is greater–than what we generally come
across among the contemporary Indian writers. Neither of them ever indulges in
the popular slogans that are the stock-in-trade of untrained journalists
passing for first-rate creative artists, while the going is good. They are not
afraid occasionally to be abstruse, where the subject demands it, or unpopular
when the occasion makes it unavoidable.
Luckily
for the reader who wants to make some kind of a comparative study of these two
authors, neither of them is too prolific a writer in terms of sheer
volume or number of titles. (One shudders to think of prolific writers, as
prolific writers go in some of our own regional languages). But their output is
not insubstantial in terms of thought content. Chaudhuri
has six titles to his credit, all of them non-fiction, while Raja Rao has four,
all of them fiction. Coming to the main topic of discussion, namely the image
of
No
two writers could be more different than these two in image of
An
image of
Kanthapura,
the novel, a good story well told, no doubt presents the
picture of an Indian village (a village in Mysore)
under the impact of the Gandhian movement of
non-co-operation in the early ’Thirties. It is good as far as it goes. But it
does not go very far. It is certainly a significant landmark, because of the
linguistic experiment it represents, in seeking to transmit an Indian sensibility
in a language that was not, and is not yet, accepted as Indian. One gets a feel
of the Kannada idiom and the regional flavour through
the curious twists and turns of the English expression. But philosophically, it
is a light-weight. It is not meant to be anything also.
It
is in The Serpent and the Rope and The Cat and Shakespeare that
we get down to the real image of
The
story is rather thin and vague, but the book has a heavy philosophical message.
To give a brief outline of the story. Rama, short for Ramaswami, is an Indian student (Brahmin by birth, let us
not forget) who goes to
What
follows in due course is not so much a conflict of cultures as a confusion of
identities. Rama, the Brahmin, finds the Indian girl Savitri
(not a Brahmin, but then a Brahmin, can marry any girl, you know) more in tune
with the music of his life than the French woman-scholar, despite the Indian
girl’s smoking, drinking and other tomboyish ways. Rama and Medeleine
fade away from each other’s consciousness with a vivid gradualness reminiscent
of the changing scenes of a motion picture. Their separation has a curious
inevitability, which is underlined by the Hindu philosophy of life, with such
delightful acuteness in the Rajju-Sarpa Bhraanti, which implies a confusion of the illusion
with the reality. There is no room for compromise here, as Rama explains
towards the end:
“The
world is either unreal or real – the serpent or the rope. There is no
in-between the two–and all that’s in-between is poetry, is sainthood …..
whether you call it duality or modified duality, you invent a belvedere to
heaven, you look at the rope from the posture of the serpent, you feel you are
the serpent – you are–the rope is. But in true fact, with whatever eyes you
see, there is no serpent, there never was a serpent ... You see the serpent and
in fear you feel you are it, the serpent, the saint. One–the Guru–brings you
the lantern; the road is seen, the long white road, going with the stars. ‘It
is only the rope.’ He shows it to you. And you touch your eyes and know that
there never was a serpent. Where was it, where? I ask you. The poet who saw the
rope as serpent became the serpent and so a saint. Now the saint is shown that
his sainthood was identification, not realisation. The actual, the real, has no
name. The rope is no rope to itself.”
Here
in this passage is summed up the central philosophy of the book. After the
quality of Brahmin-ness by birth comes the need of a Guru to light the seeker’s
path. At the end, the hero cries out, in utter helplessness, for a Guru, who is
nowhere near:
“No,
not a God but a Guru is what I need, “Oh Lord, My Guru, My Lord”, I cried in
the middle of this dreadful winter night; the winds of April had arisen, the
trees of the Luxembourg were crying till you could hear them like the triple
oceans of the goddess at Cape Comorin, “Lord, Lord,
My Guru, come to me, tell me; give me thy touch, vouchsafe,” I cried, “the
vision of Truth, Lord, My Lord.”
It
is not for nothing that this novel is seen to be auto-biographical in form.
Possibly, it is so in substance too. A character in the book says that all
books are autobiographical. That presumably reflects the author’s own view of
the subject. Raja Rao himself can be described here as a Brahmin in France. He
is a pilgrim who prays on the ghats of the Ganga at Varanasi and meditates
on the riverside of the Siene in Paris. A Brahmin, a
self-proclaimed one, is a Brahmin, be it in Bangalore
or Banaras, Paris or Boston, Trivandrum
or Texas. His is the changeless India where he is the chosen one and all is
well with the world because God in heaven and the Guru in his hermitage. The
view of India from Paris or Boston is apt to be a tint rosier than it is from
Hyderabad or Delhi!
From
The Serpent and the Rope to The Cat and Shakespeare, may not he
an unnatural transition, if we care to remember Noah’s Ark and our own
preoccupation with all kinds of animals, birds and beasts and toads in Hindu
mythology. The cat can do many things that a man cannot. It can see in the
dark, or so we seem to believe. The cat can look at a king, as the saying goes
(obviously a man cannot; he has to bow and keep his head down in India as in
all hierarchical societies). It is credited with nine lives to a mere five of
man’s. It can be all grin and no cat, as it is said of the Cheshire cat. It can
perhaps even coexist with Shakespeare, the Bard who can often be catty. We
don’t know whether the cat will laugh at the unexpected juxtaposition with a
poet-cum-playwright.
That
apart, why did Mr. Raja Rao fall in love with the cat here? Not for all these
doubtful proverbial attributes. He takes it as a traditional symbol. We see how
deeply steeped he is in the Hindu tradition, from Paris and Texas though, not
unlike Dr. Ananda K Coomaraswamy from Boston. The cat
in present context is supposed to refer to the mother cat and the kitten in the
well-known metaphysical concept of Maarjaala-Kishora
Nyaaya (as against the Markata-Kishora
Nyaaya). It suggests the blissful manner in which
the helpless little kitten surrenders itself utterly to its mother and is well
taken care of. As every devout Hindu, of the Visishtadwaita
school of thought in particular, is expected to know, the
devotee adopts an attitude of unreserved self-surrender to the Creator and he
need have no more fears about himself or his near and dear ones in
this world.
The basic idea of this
approach to Providence is repeatedly paraphrased in all its
nuances in this book and sought to be picturesquely
illustrated in some of its practical variations, as in this passage for
instance. “The kitten is being carried by the cat”, says Govindan
Nair, the voluble clerk at the Ration Office in this
story.
“We
would all be kittens carried by the cat. Some, who are lucky (like your
hunter), will one day know it. Others live bearing ‘meow-meow’ ... I like being
the kitten. And how about you, Sir?”
“Learn
the way of the kitten. Then you’re saved. Allow the mother cat, Sir, to carry
you”, he adds elsewhere.
The
cat is all right, let us grant, for Raja Rao the erudite Upanishadic
scholar and the seasoned metaphysician that he is claimed by his admirers to
be. It has after all nine lives and can risk a couple of them. But why poor
Shakespeare, dead and safely buried for about four centuries or so? In fact,
this was frankly an after-thought. Pre-publication reports from abroad said
that Raja Rao’s then forthcoming novel would be
called “The Cat” (one recalls a brief report to that effect in The
Illustrated Weekly of India). But lo and behold, good old Shakespeare was
there too, on the book jacket, trailing behind the cat. The brain-wave must
have occurred in 1964, for that was the quarter-centenary year of Shakespeare’s
birth. In justification of which, Govindan Nair is made to indulge in a clumsy humourless
parody of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. It reads:
“To
be or not to be No, no (he looks at the cat)
A
kitten sans cat, kitten being the diminutive
for
cat. Vide Prescott
of
the great grammatical fame
a
kitten sans cat, that is the
question
… … … …
Govindan Nair,
described on the dust-jacket of the book as the soul of this short novel, is
the bosom friend of Ramakrishna Pai (who is the first
person singular of the narrative), a clerk in the Revenue Board Office at Trivandrum, the locale of the story. It is supposed to
depict the life of a few middle class families of Kerala
during the period of the Second World War. (Incidentally, the author of the
novel, is known to have lived in Trivandrum for
sometime about the same period, to be near his Guru, Atmananda,
a retired officer of the Police Department, known by the name of Krishna Menon in his ‘Poorvaashram’.)
Nair and Pai are next-door neighbours, with only a low wall separating their houses. Pai has a wife (Saroj) who is practical-minded, and two young children. He comes into contact with a young school-mistress, Shanta, gentle and angelic, who falls in love with him and lives with him, out of wedlock, and has a child by him. She identifies herself with him totally, surrendering herself to him even more whole-heartedly than any wedded wife would be prepared to do. (Apart from the emotional level and the personal nature of this merger, this kind of liaison between a high-caste Namboodiri Brahmin male and a Nair female was presumably sanctified by social custom in Kerala in the not-so-distant past.) This lady puts in her personal earnings for the purchase of a house, which Pai has been dreaming of for years. The kitten principle works to everybody’s satisfaction in their daily lives.
In
the case of his friend, Govindan Nair,
who holds forth on this theme (of the mother-cat and the kitten), the same
principle works too, but not so smoothly, for there is some suffering involved
here. He loses his little son. Then he is charged with bribery and clapped in
prison, but later released on the order of the High Court. The cat also plays a
leading part in the incident at the office, evidently meant as a practical joke
against him. But this joke has a tragic sequel, for the office boss Bhoothalinga Iyer (said to wear a
Namam, believe it or not) dies when the cat jumps on
his head (sic). The cat is produced in court too. The reader is
persuaded to accept (by a rather unwilling suspension of disbelief in this
instance, as it happens) that the cat serves as the linch-pin
that keeps the whole delicate fabric together.
The
story of this novel is even thinner, vaguer, more confusing and less satisfying
than that of The Serpent and the Rope. The anecdotes (comical-tragical; tragical-comical; historical-mythological,
as Hamlet tells the players) seem to lack the feel of solid reality or even
realism and credibility. Let us now have a look at the end of the novel. Here
is the last, the very last, paragraph:
Usha says, Trivandrum
is like a place you live in your sleep. You see everything you have seen only
in sleep. “Does one sleep, Usha?” I ask. She says:
“Seeing is sleep.” Suddenly I hear the music of marriage. I must go.
The
reader does not know what to make of this dreamy sleep (at least, the present
writer does not). Is it metaphysics or comedy or poetry? Possibly, a medley of
everything in its caricature–at times conscious, at other times unconscious.
Rhetorical questions, in plenty, riddles galore, cryptic generalisations
in season and out–plausibly modelled on the Upanishadic dialogues. Confusion worse confounded. There
is, for instance, the long series of questions that lead to the profound Vedantic discovery that water comes from water” or words to
that effect.
Raja
Rao himself is quoted by the publisher as having said about the book:
“It
is a metaphysical comedy, and all I would want the reader to do is to weep at
every page, not for what he sees, but for what he sees he sees. For me it is
like a book of prayer.”
If weep he must, the reader will do so not for poignancy of feeling, but because he cannot laugh at the comedy. It seems to me more of a huge joke than a real comedy. If indeed it be a book of prayer, the reader might prefer to offer his own prayer to add–that this book be the last of its kind.
Turning
from Raja Rao to Nirad Chaudhuri
is like passing from a sweet confusion, a drowsy numbness, to a vigorous
stimulation of the mind. If one reinforces the traditional assumptions of Hindu
society in his poetical-philosophical sophistication, the other questions them
in his typically combative, aggressively challenging manner. Chaudburi is no professional historian, nor even a reliable
one (as Prof. A K. Mazumdar seeks to prove
conclusively in his recent article in Quest 91, Sept-Oct. 1974). His
data may be found to be incomplete or undependable. His arguments might often
sound perverse and his hypotheses shaky. His conclusions may not hold water.
Many of them, that is.
After
all the things that can be said against Chaudburi are
said to one’s heart’s content, it does not automatically follow that he has
nothing worthwhile to say about Indian history or the present Indian situation.
He has lots of interesting observations to make in “An Essay on the
Course of Indian History” appended to The Autobiography of an unknown
Indian (sometimes also known as The Autobiography of a known Anti-Indian).
On the lasting quality of Indian civilisation,
for instance, the hot favourite of our “golden age”
rhetoricians, he gives us a bit of his mind:
“The
question with us is only the question of remaining within the orbit of civilised life. We Hindus boast that while all other
ancient nations and civilisations have passed away,
we and our civilisation still survive. This is a
perverse boast, inasmuch as our survival is only a mummified continuity, and to
be thus extant is, to quote Sir Thomas Browne, only a fallacy in
duration……..”
To
which he adds a remark on contemporary India:
“The
imagination and even the reason of modern Indians are dominated by a vast and
strange body of myths...The only difference between the myth-mad German
and the myth-mad Indian is that the fit has no lucid moments in the Indian, and
he is more messianic than historical.”
It
is possible to refute Chaudburi’s statements, with
greater emphasis than even he could command. That is perhaps the most natural
thing to do for most educated Indians who have hard of him (for the uneducsted may not have heard of him it all), But
harsh as his remarks might be, he has a refreshingly novel angle in looking at
familiar ideas and situations. It makes us think, take a new look at the old
positions.
Anger
and exasperation are common to many and have in fact come to be recognised as the occupational diseases of the critics
of Indian society. But rarely are they allied to a wide range of knowledge,
depth of scholarship or originality of observation, Chaudhuri
can hardly be dismissed as an angry old man, though he was both old and angry
when he wrote The Continent of Circe, his extended essay on the Indian
people. There is undoubtedly much anger here, but no sign of senility of the
mind. But there is much else besides–a wealth of miscellaneous learning that
speaks of a well-stocked mind, a flair for trotting out apparently original
theories, an infectious gusto in letting the sparks of obiter dicta fly
from the anvil of personal experience and a Shavian knack for setting the harsh
truth on its head and an equally irrepressible propensity to stand
himself on his head and kick his legs in the air to attract attention. The
stimulating thought content is matched by the superb prose style.
Chaudhuri’s main thesis, in this
book (The Continent of Circe) is suggested by the allusive title he had
chosen for it. Circe, as is well-known, is the celebrated enchantress of Greek
legend, who turned the companions of Ulysses into swine and other kinds of
beasts by the power of her magic and music. He draws the ingenious parallel
that the plains of India (which he calls the Continent of Circe), what
with their heat and humility, have I like effect on her inhabitants, foreign as
well as indigenous (who were also foreign once).
One
can’t say anything for certain about the climatic theory. But one thing is
noticed by the present writer. For one reason or another, most of the European
residents in India (diplomatic and consular corps, cultural officials, etc.)
are generally found to be more pleasant to their Indian acquaintances (where
there is no obvious axe to grind) on their first arrival than after some acclimatisation to Indian conditions. They tend to become
progressively more brusque and snobbish, where they cannot afford to be
positively forbidding or offensive.
Another theory of his, central to the whole argument of the book, is that the Hindus (he does not have much use for the modern term ‘Indians’), are basically the descendants of the Aryan race, which had originally migrated from the Danube valley region in Central and South-Eastern Europe and had since forgotten their ancestral home; but they are not quite reconciled to the geographical fact of their new home in India. (An unexpected variation perhaps on Lokamanya Tilak’s theme of the forgotten home of the Aryans.) This, according to him, partly explains the irrational behaviour-patterns of the typical Hindu–the schizophrenia and dissimulation, the duplicity and lack of moral fibre, which has affected the national character of India. (Don’t we hear all too often of the ‘Crisis of Character’ affecting us?)
This
also cuts at the root of the Hindu reputation for a spiritual bent of mind and
a philosophical approach to life. (The old carboard
hoarding on the hackneyed theme of spiritual India and materialist Europe is
faded and needs to be dismantled.) On the spiritual content of a traditional
Hindu attitude, Chaudhuri has
this to say:
“…The
idea that the Hindus had great love and reverence for philosophy and respect
for philosophers is a figment of the European mind. What we respect are the Sadhus, possessors of occult power, not philosophers who
professed to possess only knowledge, and that is useless in our eyes...”
One
need not have to endorse Chaudhuri’s theory of racial
memories (which sounds farfetched) to agree substantially with his remarks on
the Sadhus and Swamis, the godmen
and miracle workers. They seem to have the largest vogue now among us, next
only to that of the film stars. The masses from the villages are well
content to catch a glimpse of latter’s mansions, where they cannot see the
stars in the flesh.
Chaudhuri’s charge-sheet against
the Hindus is most formidable indeed. On a single aspect alone, viz, that of contemporary politics, domestic and foreign,
he has this antithetical paragraph:
“...A
sense of Hindu solidarity with an uncontrollable tendency towards disunity
within the Hindu order; collective megalomania with self-abasement; extreme
xenophobia with an abject xenolatry; authoritarianism
with anarchic individualism; violence with non-violence; militarism with
pacifism; possessiveness with carelessness about property owned; courage with
cowardice; cleverness with stupidity...”
If
there is one other class whom Chaudhuri despises more
than the old-fashioned copybook Hindu, it is the modern Anglicised
Hindu. His complaint against him, curiously enough, is not that he is too anglicised or Westernised, but
that he is not anglicised or Westernised
enough. One can’t really join issue with him when he speaks of a lack of
genuine understanding of Western literature and culture among
those apparently quite Westernised, i.e., in dress and
drawingroom manners, drink and food
habits, etc. Moral pusillanimity is a more serious matter, a grave defect of
character in anyone. Chaudburi takes a glaring
example and a recent one.
“Many
instances could be given of their timidity (i. e, the
Anglicised Hindus) in the face of Hindu or
nationalistic prejudices, and I shall single out one which illustrates the
order in respect of a thing which is essential for Westernisation.
It is the use of the English language in India. There are few Anglicised Indians who can express their mind in any
language except English, and who would have been what they are without
their knowledge of English. Yet not one of these men, when in official
position, dare say a word in favour of English except
as a medium of technical instruction.”
The
panacea he suggests for the Indian situation, to effect an industrial
revolution fully, naturally and freely, is a recovery of “Our original European
spirit and character”, and conquering, so far as we can, the Indian
environment. Was it the essential prerequisite of industrial revolutions the
world over, we might ask him. He has certainly thrown up an interesting idea to
speculate upon, more, for the historian and the social philosopher than for the
economist and the industrial planner.
Chaudhuri’s attraction, if not
appeal, is to the intellectual rather than the politician. The intellectual is
one who is fascinated by the interplay of ideas, who seeks in his own way to
influence the ideas of other people. In his monograph on The Intellectual in
India the main thesis he formulates is that the modern intellectual
tradition owed little or nothing, by way of inspiration or ideas, to the older
Hindu or Muslim traditions. It was an instance of the wholesale transplantation
of the modes of thought of one culture complex in a society belonging to a
different one.
In
discussing the inception and ideology of the Indian Renaissance, Chaudhuri mentions two primary factors – alien rule and the
impact of Western ideas and culture. The new political and cultural
situation created for them by the foreign conquest led the Indians (mainly
Hindus) to undertake four major enquiries, in an effort at making a rational
adjustment to it.
1) What were the
shortcomings of their own institutions and outlooks and how were they to be
removed?
2) How was national
self-respect and confidence to be revived?
3) In what manner were
the incoming and irresistible elements of Western culture to be absorbed and
combined with their own traditions?
4) What attitude was
towards British rule and since, in the ultimate analysis, the only aim could be
political independence, how is it to be secured?
The survival of the Indian intellectual is difficult according to Chaudhuri, in face of the many powerful forces militating against him. In the three main fields, open to the intellectual, which one could expect to be most conducive to his mental activity, viz, the universities, journalism and government service, he finds the position far from encouraging. About the first, i. e., the academics of the universities he has this to say:
“...They
are intellectually stagnant. The Indian academic world is laden with a deep
somnolence without the justification of deep potations: it is mental vacuum,
and not vintage port which produces the abstracted air on the faces of the
professors. The inanition, if broken, is broken only by discontent.”
These
words were written some eight years ago. May be the position is slightly
different now. But not fundamentally. The remarks may offend the learned
professors, but cannot easily be brushed aside.
Chaudhuri revels in sweeping generalisations as Raja Rao does in lyrical musings. They
are, unsupported by well-documented hypothesis. These are sure to upset the
academic reader used to comparatively safe conclusions. Raja Rao’s India is largely that of the traditional Hindu, whose
golden age is always in the past. Nirad Chaudhuri finds
nothing so wonderful in India’s past, certainly not in the same way as
others would find it. He is all for modernisation on
Western lines. To those much used to the sentimental apologists of the glory
that is Ind, his non-conformist, unsentimental,
anti-romantic approach should serve as a necessary corrective to the national
habit of self-gratulation. It could provide a new
perspective on history as well. Raja Rao’s forte
seems to be a kind of feeling, intuition if you will; Nirad
Chaudhuri’s that of thinking and reasoning. His
writing has a cerebral quality. He does rationalise
his prejudices though. Who does not? One may call Chaudhuri
a devil’s advocate. But he is a stimulating non-conformist, full of new ideas
when conformism is not only a policy and a fashion but a new religion. Whether
we accept his conclusions or not, whether we like his reasoning or not, he disturbs
us and makes us think.