Reviews

ENGLISH

Munshi-His Art and Work–Published by Shri Kanaialal Munshi Diamond Jubilee Committee. (Sole Distributors: Padma Publications, Bombay. Pages xxiii + 545. Price Rs.15/-).

The volume under review is a worthy tribute to Sri K. M. Munshi on his attaining the sixtieth birthday. While politics has been the main obsession with the most talented in our country in recent years, those who have played a prominent part in public affairs have also, in some cases, made valuable contribution to contemporary Indian literature and have dwelt on the more enduring values of Indian culture and civilization. If India has struggled hard and yearned for political independence, it is in order to have unrestricted opportunities to give expression to the undying truths which are a part of her ancient heritage, and bear witness to them in the millieu of modern life. Thus, from the days of Raja Rammohan Roy, Rishi Dayanand and Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa to the modern day, there have arisen shining lights,–saints, philosophers, poets, and artists–who have sought to hark to the things of the spirit, and to inspire the people of the land with the immortal ideals of our ancient country. This surge of idealism has been often compendiously termed the ‘Indian Renaissance’ which, in many ways, is of more profound significance than the mere spectacular phases of political agitation and struggle that the nation has passed through and that has filled men’s thoughts.

Sri K. M. Munshi has laboured in many fields with notable success, as man of letters, as lawyer, as politician and as administrator, and has shown a (versatility of talent and an amount of noteworthy achievement given to few. His colourful personality has dominated modern Gujerati life and literature, of which he has made himself an authentic and distinguished interpreter. And while Sri K. M. Munshi has been the author of nearly fifty books, there is perhaps no other aspect of literary work in which his contribution is more noteworthy and admirable than as a writer of historical novels which have placed before modern readers, in a vivid and unforgettable manner, the glory that was Gujerat or that was Ind. While Sri K.M. Munshi is an ardent devotee of Gujerat, he has been none the less the champion of’ ‘Akhand Hindustan’.

The Diamond Jubilee Volume before us contains informative articles on Sri Munshi as a literary man, as politician, lawyer, and educationist. Friends and admirers of Sri Munshi like Sjts. N. C. Mehta, V. N. Bhushan, B. P. Bhatt and M. N. Pandye who have contributed to the volume, have appraised his literary work and presented summaries with numerous extracts from his writings which will enable the English-reading public to form an idea of Sri Munshi’s literary craftsmanship. “The Epic of the Ancient Aryans”, for instance, is almost an omnibus edition of Sri Munshi’s dramas and stories dealing with ancient times. Such work is of great value to similar workers in sister Indian languages, and might well be a model to editors of similar commemoration volumes. As one of the writers says, “Munshiji in his personality and achievements is a typical Renaissance man…..Beyond a vague sense of exhilaration, the average man betrays no symptom of being affected by the fuller life around him. But the ideal type partakes intensely of it…….Munshiji is in that grand tradition of the Renaissance man (the tradition of Leonardo, Erasmus, Rammohan, Ranade, Tagore). His literary activities, his participation in politics, his brilliance as administrator, educationist, journalist and organizer of art forms, dance-shows and dramas, fail to close the list of his interests. He is in the full stream of India in the making.”                                            
K. S. G.

The Significance of Indian Art, By Sri Aurobindo–Published by Sri Aurobindo Circle, Bombay. (First Edition, February 1947. Price Re. 1-8-0.)

Indian art today is not quite so unfamiliar a subject as it was some decades , thanks to the pioneering work of enlightened critics like Dr. Havell and brilliant interpreters like Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Certainly to the latter we owe much sustained writing which is at once scholarly and exhaustive. To this illustrious group of authentic exponents of our heritage belongs the Sage of Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo, whose poetic vision and spiritual attainment have enabled him to perceive the distinctive character of Indian architecture, painting and sculpture, as not only intimately one in inspiration with the basic concepts of Indian philosophy, religion and culture, but as a specially intense expression of their significance.

Indeed, nothing can be more valuable at the present juncture than treatises and pamphlets dealing with the special features of Indian art from the pen of eminent persons who have established their claim to worldwide recognition. Naturally, therefore, readers will be eager to partake of the feast provided, in however small a measure, by a gifted seer out of the abundance of his sensitive impressions and profound thoughts upon art in general and Indian art in particular. The present volume is a reproduction of an earlier unfinished work of the author, and it is thoughtful of the publishers to have selected their subject and presented it to the public so attractively.

Starting with an attempt, in the first chapter, to disabuse lay minds of wrong notions regarding our art-creations and art-traditions, as a result of the influence of the West upon our education, the author takes us to more detailed chapters devoted to Indian architecture, sculpture and painting respectively. If anything like a strong conviction can be left on our mind after a perusal of this small volume, it will be that, in order to appreciate own artistic past at its true value, we must first free ourselves from all pre-possessions engendered by wrong education, and then see our sculpture and painting as bearing qualities of greatness and continuity due to its close connection with the religious, philosophical and cultural ground of the race. In expressing our reverent admiration of Sri Aurobindo’s integration of purpose and pointedness of reference in these pages, it is best to quote the very words of the author; for, pre-eminently, his language is characterised by a clarity and power that are apt to be lost in the attempt to paraphrase his ideas. Adverting to the prevalence of the same form, the same multiplicity of insistence, the same crowded fullness and indented relief in our temple architecture, he says: “To find the significance, we have first to feel the oneness of the infinity in which this nature and this art live, then see this thronged expression as the sign of the infinite multiplicity which fills the oneness, see in the regular lessening ascent of the edifice the subtler and subtler return from the base on earth to the original unity, and seize on the symbolic indication of its close at the top.” A more profound interpretation can hardly be thought of to explain the structure of our Gopurams.

Turning to the vital part of his explanation of Indian sculpture, his presentation of the European and Indian approaches to the subject requires reiteration here in his own words: “The line and run and turn demanded by the Indian aesthetic sense are not the same as those demanded by the European. It would take too long to examine the detail of the difference which we find not only in sculpture but in the other plastic arts and in music and even to a certain extent in literature; but on the whole we may say that the Indian mind moves on the spur of a spiritual sensitiveness and psychic curiosity, while the aesthetic curiosity of the European temperament is intellectual, vital, emotional and imaginative in that sense; and almost the whole strangeness of the Indian use of line and mass, ornament and proportion and rhythm arises from this difference. The two minds live almost in two different worlds, are either not looking at the same things or, even where they meet in the object, see it from a different level or surrounded by a different atmosphere, and we know what power the point of view or the medium of vision has to transform the object.” Could there be a more effective and briefer summing up of the two types of mind, so foreign to each other?

While on the topic of Indian painting, he sets down, with a keen grip of the subject, the following: “Colour too is used as a means for the spiritual and psychic intention, and we can see this well enough if we study the suggestive significance of the lines in a Buddhist miniature. This power of line and subtlety of psychic suggestion in the filling in of the expressive outlines is the source of that remarkable union of greatness and moving grace which is the stamp of the whole work of Ajanta and continues in Rajput painting, though there the grandeur of the earlier work is lost in the grace, and replaced by a delicately intense but still bold and decisive power of vivid and suggestive line. It is this common spirit and tradition which is the mark of all the truly indigenous work of India.” It requires mature experience of art to make a statement so pregnant as this.

One would love to quote more of such enlivening passages but for want of space in a short notice such as this, as well as the fact that already journals devoted to art like the ‘Silpi’ of Madras have extracted useful portions of this luminous brochure in their pages. Before closing, we can unhesitatingly say that none can remain uninfluenced for long by the appeal of Indian art, if only he has taken care to study Sri Aurobindo’s masterly analysis of the subject.

K. Chandrasekharan

TELUGU

Jebu-rumala and other Stories By Sri Burra V. Subrahmanyam (Navarachana Publishing House, Mylapore, Madras Price Re. 1-8-0).

The learned author is not unknown to the English-reading public in India. He is a progressive writer with a Western outlook and a preference for the Laurencian cult. Though possessed of an extraordinary insight into Indian life, its thought and manners, and skilful as and when he chooses, his execution here is unbalanced and unequal. We must congratulate him, however, on his flowing and natural diction.

This volume includes four stories. Jebu-rumala, or the Handkerchief, where an Americanized Hindu girl jilts four suitors-taking advantage of the information the earlier one furnishes of the later–by flaunting her pretended skill at embroidery. She finally ties herself to an Indian I.C.S. officer, for the sake of money and position. She is, however, dissatisfied with other women, replicas of herself, with whom her husband desires her to move in Society. There is little story in these incidents, which are all of one uniform pattern, for her modus operandi are the very same. The characters are all wooden and lifeless. The story has an abrupt end, and one feels there ought to have been a sort of denouement to finish up the bargain she stipulated for.

Sveccha–not freedom surely, but libertinism–is a tragedy ending in the suicide of an altruistic, sophisticated husband, Srinivasa Rao, on the discovery of his wife Kameshwari’s infidelity with his own chum Ramanayya. The husband himself is mainly responsible for the tragic end which overtakes him. His mistaken understanding of Shelley and the doctrines of Free Love, and the education of his rustic wife into false notions of freedom, lead him to this crisis. Her refusal to receive his gift of Rs. 2,000 after his death is no silver lining to her black conduct, especially when nothing undesirable has been set out or even suggested against her husband’s character. There is the flavour of Fedya (Tolstoi’s ‘The Live Corpse’) about his resolution to disappear in order to effect a purely incestuous union, unpermitted by Hindu Society, between the sinning lovers.

Vamsa-vriksha–(literally, Genealogical Tree), is a detective piece dealing with the incestuous craze of the high for the low, and the scientific law that family characteristics, physical and mental, often exhibit themselves–like the crooked little finger in this instance–in odd generations. This is the story of an honest, faithful, unsophisticated labourer murdering his own son, simply because he believes him to have been born of a clandestine union of his wife Lakshmayi with Subrahmanya, son of his own putative father and master, Sundararamayya. The labourer, who is not aware of his own parentage, would not tolerate the cross-breed in his own family.

Paramarsa–(Condolence and Consolation)–is the tragic history of a virgin widow who, just about to achieve a union with her lover, loses him to her own cousin. The travail and the agony she undergoes are however stilled, and her heart deadened once for all, by his early and sudden demise. The author reaches the peak of his power of dissection of human character here. We are reminded of George Elliot, her Hetty Sorrel for instance. The narrative is natural and homely. He takes the story as a supreme example of the mystery of life and sums up his own conclusions: that human miseries are self-made and are embedded in illusions, partly set up by ourselves and partly by others; that these illusions are often the necessary results of our mistaken belief that we understand everything aright; that grief’s are the shocks we sustain when our experience is different; and that when all is said and done, “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

P. Sama Rao