Modern Gujarati Literature

BY PROF. B. K. THAKORE, I. E. S., (Retired)

Modern Gujarati literature is a vast subject. Even the list of authors and books in chronological order would take up more than an hour to read through, and would be very dry. Such a list would moreover be a mere survey of the field, a study of which, group by group, would have to follow later. A critical and historical survey with judgment, and reasoned judgment at that, on such of the phenomena as are prominently characteristic or otherwise significant of each group or author, is like skilled, elaborate embroidery. In a short article, only a tiny corner of the entire saree could be embroidered.

As I will confine myself to a few salient features of the period as a whole, I cannot be exhaustive or even comprehensive. I may appear to be over-emphatic in one place, lacking balance in another, prejudiced in a third. But if you are habituated to sift and judge for yourself, it will, I hope, give you some fruitful ideas and points of view for your own consideration and verification.

Some call this period in our country one of Renascence up to the end of the Great War and of Revolution since then. In some parts of India, (for example, in Bengal) it began earlier than in others; some of our nationalities, (for example, the Muslims) are lagging behind others. Thus the changes going on are variegated; there are patches of deeper or lighter colouring; all over India the pace is not the same; creative literary genius does not appear to be a uniform crop in any time or place; and yet it is patent that the change is taking place all over India, more or less, and the movements all over are also of the same nature, proceeding in the same direction.

Now a Renascence emerges out of the continuous contact of two divers cultures, philosophies, literatures, social structures, and modes and ideals of living. And so long as a movement is confined to the classes, the upper ten thousand, the intelligentsia, the elite, it falls short of a revolutionary movement. A revolutionary wave begins only when the masses are stirred and, not being content with leaving the arts of life to their betters, themselves take a hand. Some define the words differently. As long as only literature, art and thought are affected, it is only a culture-movement according to them. When religion and social life and morals begin to be affected in some of their fundamentals, and the tradition of generations appears to be cracking, it is a revolution, they say. We need not pause to investigate whether these two views are correlated, or whether there is some contradiction between the two and therefore some deep seated error in either of them.

Who are the most outstanding figures in Gujarati Literature today? I think we all agree they are K. M. Munshi, N. D. Kavi, and M. K. Gandhi.

Mr. Kavi attained his pre-eminence earlier, and, according to some even of his admirers, his influence has for some time been on the wane, and is now almost a spent force. He is an individualist, a romantic, a rebel. What does he rebel against? Against what appear to him empty forms out of which the spirit has vanished. Gujarati Pingal he thought an empty husk. He gave it up for the vers libre of Walt Whitman. In his view the harmony of balanced clauses and sentences, crisp and arresting, was sufficient for the depths and heights of literary art. Being an individualist, love appeared to him the only substance in marriage and in social relationship. As the man of religion preaches, "Have faith, have charity, have but these, and all the other desirables of Earth and Heaven will be added unto you," so our poet-prophet exhorts us, "Have love, have individuality, be loyal to these only, be sincere in your heart of hearts as to these only, and all else will be added unto you." Now, is that ‘seeing life steadily and seeing it whole?’ What of the sex instinct? What about the paternal and maternal instincts which are strong for a longer period than the sex instinct? What about the bonds between guru and sishya, between comrades in arms and in laborious industry; what about thankless toil, sweating at every pore, atrophying mind and heart and spirit? What about inequalities, up and down, all round us, wherever the eye pauses to have a look? What about pain and suffering, mental and emotional in nature and origin? What about the various correlations, the entanglements and the intricacies, the intimate action and reaction of highly complex and sensitive modern societies? And even in literature, are not form and matter like body and soul, character and aspiration, Prakriti and Prana?

And though he is a rebel, we have also to remember about Mr. Kavi that he is a Nationalist with all the exaggerated sentiment that local peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, customs and revels, rites and usages and conventions are apt to inspire in the extreme nationalist mentality, suffering from a morbid inferiority complex. We thus have the puzzle and contradiction that a reformer of reformers, uncompromising in matters that to him are matters of conscience, Mr. Kavi is at the same time, and to an equally ludicrous extent, a conservative of conservatives. The young champion of Love and Worship, who when beginning his career, with the aureole of youth surrounding him, appeared to my emotional friend Manishankar Bhatt (and to other admirers) almost a reincarnation of the great Narmad, destined to plant flag of achievement on some of the heights which Narmad had only descried from afar, now in the evening of his days considers all his powers and ingenuities worthily employed in trying to persuade Gujarat that his father Dalpatram was a better Brahmin, in the ideal connotation and implication of the term, than his unworthy rival, Narmad! Alas, Sic transit gloria mundi!

We now pass on to Mr. K. M. Munshi. When we considered Mr. Kavi as a writer, we dealt with the whole of him. Not so with Mr. Munshi. He is much more than a writer. But here and now we are only concerned with Mr. Munshi the writer. Narmad with all his incapacities and failings was an incarnation of reviving youthfulness in the people of Gujarat. Mr. Munshi happens upon a more self-conscious age. He hopes to offer himself in his writings as an acceptable incarnation of the reviving youthfulness of his people, at least in some aspects. What I mean is, there is not a stroke that is instinctive and spontaneous in what he has written; it is all calculated. Even his gestures when he speaks are not left to the inspiration of the moment. Mr. Munshi's writings are just as sincere as a born actor’s tones and gestures. He is also just like an actor, something of a demagogue, of course not a vulgar one, but cultured and with high aims. And it seems to me, further, that Mr. Munshi’s pen cannot be expected to delineate for us a born aristocrat, an austere and chivalrous leader whom any hint of a recompense for his services would hurt to the bone. Another of his limitations is that he stands for the secular point of view. The joys and triumphs of life here and now, the pomp and the circumstance, the struggle and the victory or defeat, the rush to seize the throne at the top of the steep ascent with perilous windings, that is the real world or the only world for him. Whether he adopts this philosophy out of conviction, or out of opposition to Nanalal and Govardhanram, it is enough for us to note that he is a materialist, though in no mean sense. All his valuations are in this world’s coinage. For long ages, India has upheld different standards, and, despite the severest buffets of fortune, has stood by other values. The yogi, the mystic, and the bhaktas are more precious to India than the born aristocrat. The successful demagogue and upstart, new to wealth, power and position, which he handles with uncertain ease, the India of our veneration does not care for at all. Mr. Munshi cannot help seeing this, and is very impatient about teaching the rising generation to leave cloud-cuckoo-lands and chimeras, and to adopt commonsense revaluations of things in every sphere. This is an essential part of his exhortations to each and all ‘to act, act in the living present’ and play the man. According to him, only such literature as sounds this note is really progressive, all other literature is reactionary or worse. Mr. Munshi is a man of wide and varied knowledge. He is a voracious reader and yet no scholar in the technical sense. No one with a mercurial temperament can be a scholar. The mere scholar, the man of thought and deliberation, who acts only when he must, and then hesitatingly, Mr. Munshi is apt to look upon as a mere pedant. As possession is nine points of the law, Mr. Munshi swears by action, rapid action, as nine points of success.

But I do not at all wish to prejudice you against Mr. Munshi. While reading him you may judge of these view-points amongst others at your leisure and in your own way. And I do hope you will remember withal that Mr. Munshi has infused a new vitality and nerve into Gujarati prose. Narmad founded modern Gujarati prose, Govardhanram elaborated it into both ornate and simple cadences, Kanaiyalal gives it the pace and friskiness of a colt. He has extended the bounds of novel, the novelette and the play. He brings something of spirit of the cinema film into all three. He experiments on and recasts every model he works with; and he can claim, I believe, as many young readers as Kalapi or Gandhiji, at least for his Siddharaj series of novels, which are the solid core in the Corpus of his achievement. Everyone who reads him, moreover, feels him as a force, irresistible if only for the moment. Can such forceful literature be only for the moment? Heaven knows! The fate of literary creators and rulers resembles that of kings in this, that each is judged relatively to his immediate successor. And in this case, although there is no dearth of imitators, no successor is dawning on the horizon yet.

Gandhiji again is far more than a mere writer. But here, as in the last case, we can only deal with the writer and his writings. While the aim of literary writing is to make the expression fit the inner mind of the writer, the aim of the speaker, preacher, propagandist or journalist is to carry his audience with him as far as possible in some sphere of outward activity.

Gandhiji as a writer belongs to the latter class. As the commander-in-chief wants each and every one of the tens of thousands of his soldiers to fight the fight intelligently, and all he addresses to them has this single purpose, so has the leader of a party. And the leader’s success in every case depends upon his own faith in his cause, and the degree of sincerity his followers perceive in his words. Gandhiji's writings possess these merits to the fullest extent. No Gujarati writing can stand comparison with his in these qualities and virtues. And there is another point, only one other point, to be noted particularly about what Gandhiji has produced. Study his writings in the historical order in which they have appeared. The very best way to learn doing a thing is to go on steadily doing the thing itself to the utmost of your power. Gandhiji is a living example of the truth of this. Though theoretically the best way, in practice it is the hardest way also, but Gandhiji persisted, and has won through. Writing, writing, writing, from before 1900 in Durban and Johannesburg, writing, writing, writing for over forty years, and throughout with his utmost power, Gandhiji, when he began as an ill-educated young man, did not know even the a, b, c. of writing. He persisted. He threw himself into it. He read the best authors. He translated. He wanted his readers to grasp what he aimed at, what he was doing, what he was asking them to do, why and how self-respect and national honour were involved in doing that particular thing, at that particular moment, particularly well. His success at every stage, and from day to day, depended upon his power of moral suasion, and upon the response he gained day after day from a sufficient number of his readers. He himself went on leading by making the greatest conceivable sacrifices day by day, and by treating those who joined him as equal comrades by whom he would stand through thick and thin. And he asked of his would-be followers nothing but to make sacrifices themselves. His character went on being refined and hardened in this furnace of experience. His pen, the pen of a beginner, who had but a little time to finish what he wanted to say and print it, sometimes next to no time at all, this pen also went on being refined and chastened, improved and perfected, hour by hour, year by year. You see it all spread out before you if you read his writings in the order of their dates. Here you have a most remarkable and convincing illustration, continued for an entire generation, of the power of the pen formed by the power of the character behind. For a similar illustration one can only think of a Milton, a Wordsworth, or a Dante, Shakespeare is not in the picture. Tolstoi does not fall into this category, and if Rousseau’s pen was also a mighty power, it derived its might from something other than the writer’s character.

I want to draw your attention to only one other figure in modern Gujarati Literature. That one is Govardhanram M. Tripathi, a writer who surpasses in depth every other, ancient or modern, who has ever written in Gujarati; whose works are as certain of immortality in Gujarati as Premanand’s. Govardhanram is a pre-revolutionary; and although a nationalist he is the intellectual nationalist, whom emotional nationalists hate even more than non-nationalists or anti-nationalists. He typifies the Renascence and is our best and most intellectual representative of it. He had faith in literature and art, in mere literature and art, and Vidya, the graces, the Apsaras or the goddesses of beautiful and thought-inspired harmony, such as practical men like Gandhiji laugh at, only men of the eminence of Gandhiji are justified in laughing at, since they alone area able to produce from their ‘non-literary’ writing results greater by far than the achievements of pure literature, art and Vidya. Govardhanram believed in a rejuvenation of India by gradual absorption of two influences: the influence of the West, and the influence of the ancient East, especially of ancient Aryavarta, as she had been, before she fell upon evil days and became degraded and enslaved to foreign rulers and the zulum of custom, worse than foreign domination. And faith was that, as these influences strengthen in modern India and spread wide and deep, the blood of modern India would be renovated and become youthful once more, and then India would rise to her full height, the personification of a spiritual and secular power, of intelligence and humanism, greater than any so far evolved in the long annals of the human race.

I must also add a few lines on Govardhanram the artist. The Great Novel, the ‘noveloon,’ if I may coin a word, that is to say, a story running through a series of novels, like the story of King Arthur running through the ‘Idylls of the King,’ is coming into fashion in post-war European literature. Galsworthy and Romain Rolland are but the best known leaders a group of writers, increasing in number in the literature of Europe. But when Govardhanram wrote the Sarasvatichandra, he had no such models before him, and yet simply because he had so much thought and emotion stored up on various aspects the lives of his countrymen, he planned an enormous work in five parts, dedicated himself to its execution, and when faced with failing health, cut down the original design and still accomplished it neatly in four, giving us concentric circles round the hero, in a panorama that, height beyond height, unrolls before us the entire complex and varied life of our people, strata the most ward and the most advanced being equally included, their correlation to one another never at fault. The range of thought he traverses is as vast as the range of life. The reader sits as it were in the centre of an amphitheatre, the succession of rungs each picturesque in itself leading him on, until it is no exaggeration to say that the eye is dazzled by the white effulgence of the empyrean overhead. Sarasvatichandra has been styled the Gujarati purana of the nineteenth century. It places simultaneously before us three generations, each true to nature and to environment, not a false line or colour, not a loose end being perceptible in the mutual relations to the three.

To conclude, let me advise you to read Nanalal for idealism, Munshi for vigour and vivacity, Gandhiji for faith and hope, and Govardhanram for a sympathetic understanding of our variegated land and people.