The English Plays and Poems of Kailasam

BY Prof. V. A. THIAGARAJAN M.A.
(The Central College, Bangalore)

To the anchorite the world is a show. To the artist, says Kailasam, it is the after-glow of life’s experience. He says elsewhere that it is the privilege of the artist to display the play of the Trinity. If the artist is to discharge this function adequately, he must have a mind deep as the sea, a soul which can sympathise with the sufferings of fellow men, and have a honey-sweet witchery of expression. Kailasam sees clearly the artist’s ideal, which is also the artist’s purpose. Let us now investigate to what extent he has approximated to this ideal.

Art is inseparable from the personality of the artist. A man’s personality is seen in his reaction to his immediate environment which is the arena of action. But the immediate present is to Kailasam the pole of discord. He is, in the language of psychology, an escapist. He says,

“Let ‘parties’ ‘sabhas’ and ‘blocks’
Revel in plots and cliques,
Let congressites pull up their socks
At risk of bursting breeks,

Let ‘leaguers’ spout of ‘Pakistan’
With tongues in brazen cheeks,
Let ‘Crackistans’ and ‘Talkistans’
Absorb political freaks.”

He also says, speaking of the world situation,

“To me, why all this war-time fuss
Is but a beastly bore.”

Kailasam describes himself as a sixth columnist, as one who is interested only in his own personal raj. This apparent indifference is only a mask meant to hide from the world, and perhaps from himself, a sense of frustration with life. Average humanity accepts the muddle of the mediocre and thrives in it. But Kailasam, like Lord Byron, plays the inverted moralist with the world, and sees in life the eternal Cain. He says in Truth Naked that the brute in man silences the voice of God in man. This, he says, is the history of man from the dawn of life. In a poem on the death of Raleigh he unmasks the pretensions of court and priest, of wisdom and skill. He is interested in unmasking conventional hypocrisy. If, in his poems, Kailasam tries to escape from the limited present, it is because he is consumed by a fierce love of truth. In this respect he resembles his own lake, which in the very process of being consumed in its destructive love of the sun, gains the larger freedom of the sky and the sea.

The personality of Kailasam, as revealed to us in his poems, gives to us the right perspective in which we should contemplate his dramas. In the contemplation of the past, he finds that freedom which the present denied him. He claims to have lived in the past in some capacity or other. The past is to him not an escape but a haven of refuge. We have therefore a right to ask the dramatist what light he sheds on life.

The shortest of Kailasam’s dramas is The Burden. The theme is taken from the Ramayana. The language of the play is slightly poetical. We do not know if Kailasam intended that it should be printed as poetry. Kailasam may go to the ancient world for refuge, but he finds there the same problems that confront him in the modern world. The theme of the play is the same as that of The Smiling Seven, a euphemism for the Simon seven. In this poem Kailasam says,

“When Greed, a demon, ‘gin or elf
Obsesses a human soul
’Tis sense of pleasure or power or pelf
Distorts a human goal;
And he, confusing sense for self
Doth fork out Satan’s toll
In loss of manhood, honour, truth,
Love of land of birth....”

Neither time nor sex seems to modify human nature very much. Bharata and Satrughna are introduced to us as returning from their uncle’s home. They are represented as two modern young men slightly sophisticated, and grossing about the ills of life, apparently because they do not know what the ills of life are. As the play unfolds, Bharata feels what it is to bear the burden of life. At each stage the earlier burden seems to be lighter than the succeeding one. The inconveniences of the road pale into insignificance before the burden of kingship and this in turn gives place to the greater burden, the sullen resentment of the courtiers. But the greatest of burdens that Bharata is called upon to bear is a mother’s misplaced affection. In Karna Kailasam says that mother love is like God’s love of man, but here he feels the destructive side of the love.

“Why, blindest, maddest love of all, I ween
Is certes, weird and wondrous mother love.”

He finds in Kaikeyi the consuming aspect of this mother love, as it burns up all lesser passions, such queen. Apostrophising her, the poet says,

“Thy wiles brought gall to all, and joy to none,
Misguided queen, Ambition’s thoughtless fool.”

But the dramatist speaks more in pity than in anger. He regards the bringer of misfortune as the touchstone of the true worth of others. Weak hearts give way to grief. All Ayodhya was plunged into grief. But there was one man whom sorrow could not move,

“Even a madded woman’s monster crime
Could scarcely ruffle his soul serene, sublime.”

In pity’s light, says Kailasam, God views all human sins. He finds in Rama’s conduct to Kaikeyi the revelation of the God in man. What Bharata is called upon to bear is the burden of this misguided mother love with the fortitude of Rama. He feels it to be a superhuman task. He asks Vasishta, “Why, great one, why the trial of this one humble soul spell a great people’s grief?” No answer is given, for to attempt to answer it would be to dub oneself a conventional consoler.

The burden of life is intermixed with the purpose of life. In his Purpose Kailasam raises the fundamental question, what is the purpose of life? He himself seems to feel with Omar Khayyam,

“Tis all a chequer-board of nights and days
Where Destiny with man for pieces plays,
Hither and thither moves and mates and slays
And one by one in the closet lays.”

In Kailasam’s play, even Bhishma, the custodian of cosmic truth, does not see the purpose of life clearly. He says to Drona, “We are play acting in scenes, Acharya, whose every line we know, without knowing the purport of the play. We are walking on paths, Acharya, every step of which we know, without knowing the purpose of the journey.” But it is false philosophy to cover a wilderness of ideas within a wall of words, and say that man is the sower, and God is the reaper, as though society were based on moral irresponsibility. Drona tells him that God knows the purpose of life, but Bhishma feels that if the purpose of God is the destruction of man, as he fears that the purpose of all military training is likely to be, then it is poor consolation, for it is kin to despair.

Although Bhishma and Drona are in the dark as to the ultimate purpose of life, sub specie eternitatis, their ignorance does not prevent them from sitting in judgment upon the younger generation and criticising their purpose in life. The young who are not burdened with thought take life as a joyous adventure. Arjuna’s purpose in life is synonymous with his personal ambition, to become the greatest archer of all time. Ekalavya’s purpose in life is to rid the world of all the wolves in all the forests, and to save all the fawns from destruction. And the young incidentally teach wisdom to the old. Arjuna’s ambition in life is dismissed as the least worthy, for it is inseparable from egoism and vanity. Drona realises that his own purpose in life is but middling, while he finds in Ekalavya a life animated by the noblest purpose, for his purpose is identical with righteousness. Life’s purpose is thus unfolded in the interplay of human motives in relation to the day-to-day work of man.

Ekalavya, the knight errant of Nature, is but a Nishada. The Mahabharata says that he was physically dirty. The Aryans regarded him as intellectually inferior, and socially contemptible. In every closed society morality becomes identical with class loyalty. Kailasam gives a modernistic interpretation to this ancient story by setting the good qualities of Ekalavya against the snobbery and race pride of Arjuna. He makes his Ekalavya say to Arjuna, “It seems to me that, according to you, the only thing that one has to be proud of in being an Arya is that one is not a Nishada. If then there were no Nishadas at all in this world, you poor Aryans would have nothing to be proud of in being Aryas!” He says further, “Pride in one’s caste more than in one’s power to do good is the surest sign of a weak head.” Kailasam sets in sharp contrast Aryan pretence against non.Aryan earnestness. He shows how those who forget their self-limitation fall lower than the average. As a dramatist Kailasam is interested in exposing the littleness of great men. He brings out not only the snobbery of Arjuna, but he also makes Arjuna play upon Drona’s fear of Bhishma, as it may well happen in any modern society.

Kailasam has in many respects materially departed from Vyasa. He makes Ekalavya the protagonist of a Raksha Yoga, the friend behind phenomena. He makes Ekalavya’s cutting off his thumb a voluntary act, meant to redeem the Guru “from an unmeant untruth unwittingly uttered”. He has thus ennobled the character of Drona himself in the retrospect. In the original story Ekalavya shows his craftsmanship upon a dog which barks at him. In Kailasam he shows his skill upon a wolf which has mauled a fawn. Plot, character and incidents are alike modified in a spirit of creative reconstruction. But it is a dangerous experiment, and one has to be on guard against a run-away imagination, as his Karna amply proves.

Kailasam does not make his Ekalavya a superhuman paragon of virtue. He shows how, subconsciously, his resentment against the wolves is transferred in part against Arjuna, and how this blind resentment makes him wish to physically blind his enemy in the battle- field. This blind hatred goes with a sense of blind loyalty to a bad king, and of blind reverence to a Guru which is half-ashamed to recognise him. However, in so far as Ekalavya forgets swadharma, that of extirpating the wolves, and is drawn into a political vortex, he is swept aside by Krishna, whom no human pity moves, as a human wolf intent upon killing his fawn, Arjuna. This part of the story of Ekalavya is entitled Fulfillment, but is it fulfillment or frustration?

A life without a purpose, said Marcus Aurelius, is a fruitless, useless thing. Goethe conceived the purpose of life to be im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen resolut zu Leben. Bernard Shaw in an unacknowledged borrowing from Samuel Butler says,

“Just as life, after ages of struggle, evolved that wonderful bodily organ, the eye, so that the living organism could see where it was going and what was coming to help or threaten it, and thus avoid a thousand dangers that formerly slew it, so it is evolving today a mind’s eye, that shall see not the physical world, but the purpose of life, and thereby enable the individual to work for the purpose instead of thwarting and baffling it by setting up shortsighted personal aims as at present.”

The traditional wisdom of the Hindus has identified the purpose of life with the message of the Gita. And perhaps the right way to interpret the character of Krishna is to regard him as one who converts the Dionysian element in man into the Apollonian, activity into light. On the one hand is dance, music and rhythm. On the other the battle of Kurukshetra. The soul of man evolves between these two poles of activity–the pleasing and the terrible. In Kailasam’s play Krishna claims to be the alter-ego, claims to watch the purpose of life from the point of view of a far-off watcher in the skies, and therefore of one who is beyond pleasure and pain. But Kailasam also makes out Krishna to be beyond good and evil. This is how Kailasam understands Krishna:

“A woman’s witching face, her ways, her eyes;
A panther’s frame, its grace, mayhap its heart;
An eerie mastery of ev’ry art,
A honey tongue that steeped all truth in lies
And yet could strip all lies in the light of Truth;
A smile that mocked at sight of friend in woe;
A breast that bled at sight of fallen foe;
Ador’d and yet afear’d of all, in sooth;

Thou tangled mass of man and god and brute,
What mortal mind can con thy rainbow-life
That blazed undimmed ’mid storms of human strife
And glean the wisdom of thy madd’ning flute,
Thy love-lit crimes, thy kindly cruelties,
Thou paradox for all eternities!”

Kailasam makes Krishna murder Ekalavya and his mother. Although the former deed may be justified only on grounds of political expediency, there is no excuse for the latter, nor does it find a place in Vyasa. The only redeeming feature here is that the mother remains only a voice and is never seen on the stage. Yet the prime question, what is the purpose of life, remains to be answered. Krishna merely says, “To the far-off distant watcher of this world, all things of this world look alike.” Even granting that God is some kind of an absentee landlord, the dramatist does not make out the purpose of the remote watcher himself. Kailasam leads us into a blind end. We are reminded of Heine’s poem, The Question. A man stands on the sea-shore and asks, “What is the purpose of life?” Nature answers him and says, “A fool asks the question.” The tragedy of Kailasam is that like Heine he lacks reverence for life.

Kailasam does not subscribe to the doctrine that might is right. He dismisses the words of Drona to Arjuna, “Righteousness is neither right, nor yet wrong; neither kind nor cruel–but righteousness is but just strong. Righteousness is God,” as emotion run away. We are thus thrown upon the words of Bhishma who speaks of “the haze of uncertainty in which is shrouded the purpose of all this”. To say that death is the purpose of life is cold consolation indeed. It is not even intellectually satisfying, for it raises the other question, what is the purpose of death? The dramatist converts a simple ignorance into a compound ignorance and lands us in a vicious circle. Intellectually Kailasam invites us to a feast of Tantalus. But emotionally he creates a fellowship of suffering, as our hearts vibrate in unison with the human victims of the tragedy; something like the way in which he wished that the body of the bowman should vibrate in unison with his bow, “like the lotus nodding in sympathy with each breath of wind that sighs across the lake”.

Kailasam’s Karna is once again a play of commiseration. It is in the nature of a chronicle play. It lacks in unity of action. The only unity which the play has is that it all happens to a single individual. It should be regarded as a defect of art. The theme of the play is taken from the Adi, Sabha and Karna parvas of the Mahabharata. Vyasa dismisses Karna in the words of Draupadi as Papishtamathim Karnam. He is represented as the evil-genius of Duryodhana. In Kailasam’s play all this is changed. It raises once again the fundamental question of the freedom of art. In literature as in politics no man has a right to invade the freedom of another. By transposing Kama’s education under Parasurama to an earlier period of his life, by keeping out the charioteer from the scene of contest, by giving to Kama a speech which is exactly the opposite of what Vyasa gives him in the Sabha, by giving a distorted version of the Gita, by withholding Krishna’s speech to Karna where he gives a catalogue of his sins of commission and omission, by a suppressio veri and a suggestio falsi, Kailasam has produced a Karna who may not recognise his original self in Vyasa. Those whose tastes are conservative may be excused if they prefer Vyasa to Kailasam. It is like carting away a few cartloads of ready made stones from Tippu Sultan’s fort in order to build one’s own modest house. The law for the preservation of ancient monuments should, one feels, be extended to the monuments of literature also.

Karna as understood by Kailasam is however the victim of a tragedy of fate. A curse hangs over his birth, life and death. That is why Kailasam calls his play an impression of Sophocles in five Acts. Like King Oedipus he wanders the earth “a nameless aimless waif”. Fate plays various pranks with him. But, whether he is victor or loser in the drama of life, he comes out, according to Kailasam, with soul unscathed. The dramatist represents him as “the bejeweled bauble of the jeering gods”.

In Kailasam’s play Karna is redeemed not by any noble action, but by an arrested impulse which makes him desist from being an active participant in wrong doing. If he had been a bit more precipitate, he would have helped others to gain their ends without gaining anything himself. There is, says Elliot, an interval between the thinking and the doing. To the hollow men, it is a blank period of the mind. To Karna it is the lucid interval when the mind is most active. In Kailasam’s play Karna is redeemed by nobility of motives, precisely because passion is not translated into action Kama thus converts his inferiority complex into moral superiority, and a curse into a blessing. Kailasam’s Karna, in so far as it is a Sophoclean play, is also an exposition of the Hegelian idea of tragedy as a conflict of right against right. In this conflict, where the tragedy lies in each party invading the right of another, Karna represents conscience, and conscience, like Javert in Les Miserables, just dies, unable to take sides. But if it is nobler to suffer wrong than to inflict it, Karna stands redeemed. Kailasam’s own interpretation of the character of Karna comes out in the speech of Panchalee. She says to Kama,

“Mine eyes that now are oped to see
Beyond a human’s flesh-bound sight, do now
Descry the real whence and wherefore of
Thy birth! Do not believe the mortal man
That lies he gat thee! Believe not
Mortal woman that lies she brought thee forth!
Believe but me that am not myself earthly in
My birth! Thou art, in sooth, some stray ray of
Some strange star that hath, by some
Mishap, astrayed into this sinful world!”

Karna is afflicted not by the Brahmin’s curse, but by that which is the cause of that curse–the irregularity of his origin. The sins of the parents are visited upon the children. He is the victim of society’s will to live. Society cast him out. Having received no kindness from society he owes it no obligations. The victim of society turns out to be the enemy of society. His obligations are purely personal, and Karna becomes the nemesis of the Pandavas. There is a family likeness between Karna and Ekalavya. Both are victims of the organised cruelty of society–the one by being born a non-Aryan, and the other by being disowned by the Aryans. In either case the author takes to heart the disowned children of society. What the builders of society rejected, Kailasam converts into the key-stones of the edifice of art. And as in Goethe’s Faust they stand not condemned, but redeemed.

The three plays, Purpose, Fulfillment and Karna, give to us a trilogy of pain. Panchalee says that she is the daughter of dread fire, born to destroy the entire Kuru house, and Bhishma agrees with her and says that she speaks the simple truth. Kailasam seeks in annihilation an escape from the burden of life. The dramatist’s purpose is purely negative. Like his own Krishna, he strips all lies in the light of truth. But he does not give to us any abiding truth. He presents clearly pain as the thesis, and death as the antithesis. The antithesis is as true as the thesis, but he fails to give to us the synthesis of life. Kailasam lacks reverence for life, and mistakes darkness for light. At any rate he does not take us beyond the twilight of the imagination.

It is wrong to take a purely mechanistic view of life and explain everything in terms of the struggle for existence and the so-called survival of the fittest. To do so would be to place life in the hands of some blind chance, which does not know its own purpose. On the other hand it is equally futile to put the purpose of life outside life, in the hands of some far-off watcher of the skies, as though the world is handed over to the devil. The pundits of science give to us a godless reality: the exponents of religion tend to make God unreal. Both have missed the significance of life. Life is not a means to an end. It is an end in itself, and the object of life is better life. The Elan Vital is a progressive unfoldment of an immanent divine purpose. Kailasam raises the problem. Bergson solves it.

If, as an artist, Kailasam is a solitary with none to keep him company except as audience, it is because he lacks that Promethean faith which recreates its ideals out of the wreckage of the past. To say, “If youth but knew, if age but could,” is to wish for the impossible, to be at once one’s own grandfather and one’s own grandson. Life remains arid so long as one does not draw upon the stock of racial experience. The stream of life flows, like an artesian well just below the sands of pain and the rock of death, just waiting to be liberated. Kailasam does not take us into these magic regions. We may say of him, as Goethe said of Byron, that Kailasam is the child of passion; the moment he begins to reflect he is like a child.