Short Stories from Kannada

Short Stories from Kannada^*

“The Poetry of Valmiki” gave us glimpses of the depth and fineness of Mr. Venkatesa Iyengar’s culture and the renderings of his Kannada series which appeared in Triveni provided a measure of the greatness of Mr. Iyengar as a creative artist. But the publication of these thirty-two stories, in their bulk and variety, has given us an entirely new vision of the ripe wisdom and massive creative power of this great man. There are many Indian short-story writers who have produced one or two master-pieces in this difficult modern art. But we believe there is no one in India to-day who may be compared with Masti for the naturalness and ease with which he can express in this form the best in himself and his people, the very contour and climate of a complex culture.

Perhaps the chief difference between a grandmother’s tale and a modern short story arises from the far greater importance attached in the latter to realism of character and atmosphere. The two possible extremes of the kind are well represented in this collection by The Shah Abbas stories at one end and by Ugrappa’s New Year Day at the other end. The two stories on the justice of the Muslim ruler are magnificently self sustained narratives in which the stream-line effect depends entirely upon the events and their co-ordination, and the speed and continuity of narration are matched by the stern suppression of comment or moral. Ugrappa’s New Year Day is a leaf from a villager’s diary, which has the incoherent excitement and complex, haphazard, eddying confusion of actual history.

From the storied past of south India are derived the heroic tales of self-sacrifice, The Queen of Nijagal and The Krishna Idol of Penukonda, as also the even more heroic tale of The Pandit’s Will and Testament, an illustration of the selfless objectivity that comes from our wide, deep, impersonal traditional learning.

The three Rangappa stories–his Marriage, Deepavali and Courtship–are social comedies of rustic life, looked at through the twinkling, humorous eyes of a village elder, acquainted with modern education and himself romantically inclined.

My Teacher and The Curds Seller are sympathetic pictures of human relations in Hindu families, where deep love and tolerance flow as a steady undercurrent beneath the froth and foam of strife.

The Kalmadi Buffalo and The Judgment Here, to be contrasted with A Letter of The Abbe Dubois, illustrate different methods of approaching and studying “pagan” psychology.

Was it Indira? and Lakshamma of Melur are delicate studies in abnormal psychology, the one passing and the other settled. In A Story of The Holi Feast a village superstition receives an unexpected confirmation. Venkata Rao’s Ghost and A Malnad Ghost treat of the supernatural from two entirely different angles and make the flesh creep in spite of rational explanations and recantations of belief.

Subedar in Danger and Jogy Anjappa’s Fowl are clever and amusing police cases of very different degrees of criminality.

Krishnamurti’s Wile, Rangasami’s Folly, Venkatasami’s Love and That Woman, all strike a modern note and they all skate, at some point or other, on thin ice. But the lurking danger of unpleasant lapses is avoided by consummate tact of narration and by a hard consistent realism. The placid surface of the social waters closes irrevocably over the transient bubble of sentiment. The stately banyan grows where Venkatasami and his romance lie buried and That Woman is still that woman.

The Return of Sakuntala and The Last Day of a Poet’s Life are exquisite literary reconstructions, perhaps recreations, which testify to the author’s loving familiarity with Kalidasa and Goethe.

An Old Story is a great achievement in its kind, and with Another Old Story, Sri Ramanuja’s Wife and The Last Days of Sariputra, forms a class of prose poems which we in India at once recognise to be true to life in every detail, but which foreign critics would no doubt set down as far-fetched and impossible.

Vying for first rank with An Old Story, more complex but less firm in its structure is Masumatti (rendered by Rajaji as ‘Venuganam’), an allegorical masterpiece on the power of music and on the power of surviving form to recapture the departed spirit.

Other classifications are equally possible, but it would be impossible by comment, extract, summary or sub-division to illustrate the happy ease and many-sidedness of Masti’s genius. His approach and treatment, his construction, characterisation and style, not only vary from theme to theme but they fit each theme with the healthy, pleasant appropriateness of a natural organic growth. Again and again, as one reads these tales, remembering their initial similarity with those of other Indian writers, one trembles with anxiety for the next step. One expects a false note, a wrong turn of sentiment, an ersatz event; but every time one is pleasantly disappointed and the pitfalls which have betrayed so many other Indian short-story writers are avoided by Masti by the simple old device of viewing our life as in itself it is really lived, without pride or shame and without any advertence to the possible reactions of the “foreign critic “ or the “modern reader”. Such artistic strength, such sublime confidence comes to the man who knows and loves his people and accepts their ways of living and thinking and feeling, without complaint or protest or irritable anxiety to reform. In the result we have in all these stories, and pervading each from beginning to end, a classical quality which is healthy natural and completely satisfying. The richness and variety, the form, colour and texture, are not the result of effort. They have come as the light freshness of leaves, as the softness and fragrance of flowers, as the slow-maturing ripeness of good fruit; and they represent a perfection attainable not by any sudden magic gift or the hard mechanical labour of an hour, but the slow mellowing fulfillment of a long, calm growth through many seasons of sun and rain. The comparison with trees is indeed inevitable for work of this slow and satisfying quality. Our only comment as we finish story after story, is that the miracle behind the real mango tree yielding its natural fruit in the fullness of the years, is far more wonderful than the trick of the conjurer, which forces a mango fruit in a few minutes. Masti deals all the time with those delightful, eternal commonplaces which having been, will ever be. His stories have the same rich even texture, the same continuous natural magic, the same prevailing “negative capability”, which content us in the best poems of Keats.

Masti’s characters live, and they live a normal life. It is this combination of vitality and normality that makes each story in its own historical and geographical setting and social milieu a true and convincing picture of South Indian life, indeed of human life in one or other of its aspects. Some one in each tale–often the teller, and the commentator, if not the hero–lives this vivid, intense, sane life and presents the heroic with admiration, the pathetic with pity and the comic with a smile. By his power of sympathetic imagination, the all-comprehending charity which is Brahma’s greatest gift to his chosen Children, Masti creates for each situation, however coarse or exquisite, however high or low, a set of characters with the adhikara to act in it or to contemplate it. He loves them all, but judges none. He succeeds by sheer self-effacement. He sows himself, his opinions and prejudices, and reaps a rich harvest of living men and women.

^* SHORT STORIES in four volumes–By Masti Venkatesa Iyengar, with a foreward by Sri C. Rajagopalachariar. (The Author, Gavipur Extension, Basavangudi, Bangalore.) Price Rs. 2.10 a volume.