Reviews

The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene. (Heinemann, London. Price 9s. 6d.)

THE Penguin New Writing published a couple of years ago (Nos. 27 & 28), an article by John Hampson, entitled “Movements in the Underground” which examined exhaustively and with correct critical appraisal what present-day English writers were making of the shadier side of life and society. I was struck with the scope and sweep of the subject, its originality, the variety in its one-ness, and when Mr. Hampson came out to India early this year I had occasion to meet him here, in Madras, and during the times we met, listen to many of his illuminating criticisms of the works of contemporary English novelists, and among them those of Graham Greene. Greene, I knew, both as a novelist and as a writer of travel books, having read some of his novels, Rumour at Nightfall, Stamboul Train, A Gun for Sale, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and Lawless Roads, a travelogue. “Graham Greene,” observes Mr. Hampson, “one of the most important of the younger generation of novelists, employs the sinister aspect of life in order to point a moral. Greene is in a class apart from most of the writers in this genre, since his approach is based on certain spiritual beliefs. He is a Catholic, and this results in a stand which gives his work authority, direction, and purpose. One may challenge or reject his viewpoint, of course, but his novels, while embracing the tenets of his faith, have valid qualities which make them important.”

The Heart of the Matter, Greene’s latest novel, is red hot stuff. The scene is the African Coast with British Administration as the hero. Among the characters are a Chief of Police, an elderly soft-hearted man with much of his softness for the natives; his wife who is devoted to poetry and hence is distrusted by the rest of her race; and the inevitable third party–a young girl, one of those rescued from a torpedoed ship, parted from her husband who is lost, her honeymoon coming to a sudden, tragic end. The Chief of Police, so good, so human, so soft-hearted, is drawn to the girl; he betrays his wife but continues to love her and also love the girl; and unwavering, above these two to whom he gives his love, in his love of God. It is a bitter world in which the forces of evil are abroad, with a darkness that has the quality of a blinding effulgence; only by implication, by suggestion, is manifest, like little stellar gleams, the benign, the protective love of God. The Chief of Police is a man of goodwill and “only the man of goodwill,” says Greene, “carries always in his heart the capacity for damnation.” Have you ever thrown a stone at a pane of glass and seen and felt it shattering to stars and arcs with sounds of a most agonising crack and tinkle? If you have not, do it, just to realise the style and manner of Graham Greene. It cuts, it slashes; it also soothes and saves. By the choice of epithet as well as image, by the selection and correlation of mood and movement, Graham Greene reveals a superlatively integrated mind, burning with religious faith, eternal in its search for destiny and spiritual fulfillment, with deliberate speed, majestic instancy.

MANJERI S. ISVARAN

Yama and Yami, by Manjeri S. Isvaran (S. Viswanathan, Central Art Press, 14, Singanna Naick Street, Madras. Price 12 as.)

MANJERI S. ISVARAN has established himself today as a noted Indo-anglian not only finding prominent mentions of his work in encyclopedias of literature but having been read out also on the BBC. If it is needless to introduce him to the readers of Triveni, it is also difficult for one who has been ‘twin’ with him to bestow praise on him.

Isvaran has made his mark both as a poet and as a short story writer. Though to a world less given to reading poetry, he has more often, especially recently, come with his stories, it is his essential poetic spirit that he has presented us through his stories; in some of the shorter ones among these, he has merely done prose-poems.

Yama and Yami, dainty reprint from Swatantra is, like his Sivaratri, wrought out of the golden ore of ancient Indian lore. Yama and Yami, twin issues of Sun, brother and sister, prime progenitors of human race, Day and Night, the spirit of the dead beyond and that of those still alive here, is a legend-complex of Indo-Iranian antiquity; the meanings of the myth had become somewhat indistinct even in the vedic times. In  Rik X. 10, we find the brother and sister in dialogue, the brother remonstrating against the love of the sister; the Rita and Anrita, right and wrong, of the incest from which the brother gently dissuades the eager sister, is a moral hymn for man’s guidance; as a cosmogonic myth, however, the incest of this primeval twin Yama-Yami is as inevitable a symbolism as that of Prajapati and his daughter.

To his version of this old vedic dialogue, Isvaran has added a significant epilogue, tagging on to the vedic legend the story of the origin of the great river Yamuna, who is also sister of Yama and daughter of Surya. It is the tearful Yami, sorrowing for her unyielding brother who had gone away, that flows out as the dark Yamuna. The sister of Kausika Visvamitra similarly transformed herself into the river Kausiki for the good of the world. Rivers are not merely the sources of our sustenance but the symbols of the flowing current of life itself. Yami-Yama yearning here for the Yama beyond is the eternal longing of the living here for one-ness with the One there, above life and death.

DR. V. RAGHAVAN

TAMIL

Theendathan, Rendered into Tamil by K. Ganesh from the Original English Novel, Untouchable, by Mulk Raj Anand. (Pudumai Padippaham Ltd., Karaikudi. Price Rs. 3-12 as.)

DR. MULK RAJ ANAND is one of the few Indian writers in English who have had a sympathetic hearing both in our country and in England. Social life in India affords an EI Dorado of interest and profit to the amateur writer and the master craftsman alike, and in this it is as easy to be futile for the one as to be preachy and pedantic for the other. Happily, Dr. Anand has not been guilty of putting the fly of propaganda in the jam of his creative work. Untouchable was first introduced to the British public by Mr. E. M. Forster of whom an eminent literary critic remarked: “For knowing India, having taste in literature, and being artistically incorruptible, Mr. Forster is a welcome intermediary between ourselves and an author whose work might easily have escaped attention.” I know of no Indian writer who had been benefited more soundly from criticism of his English contemporaries, nor of one who had made, as Dr. Anand has, such wonderful strides between novel and novel: Untouchable, Coolie, Two Leaves and A Bud, The Village, Across the Black Waters, The Big Heart.

The whole action of Untouchable is fitted into one day; this might suggest a certain artificial forcing of the plot but Dr. Anand has, with considerable skill, treated his material in such a way that the events seem perfectly convincing. The story centres round Bakha, a young ‘untouchable’ of eighteen who started to clean latrines at the tender age of six, but dreamed of becoming a Sahib, watching the life of the soldiers in barracks. I am quoting from the original which is before me while reading through the translation: “He (Bakha) didn’t like his home, his street, his town, because he had been to work at the Tommies’ barracks and obtained glimpses of another world, strange and beautiful; he had grown out of his native shoes into the ammunition boots he had secured as a gift. And with this and other strange exotic items of dress he had built up a new world which was commendable, if for nothing else, because it represented a change from the old ossified order and the stagnating conventions of the life to which he was born.”

Bakha accidentally polluting a high-caste Hindu; Bakha approaching the porch of a temple into which he has no entry; Bakha smouldering with rebellion when he learns of a priest’s attempt to seduce his young sister; Bakha coming into contact with the enlightening tenets of an English missionary–all these are recounted with a candour which doesn’t wince at the many dreary details and filthy realities of a scavenger’s life. It is a story told effortlessly, and the telling produces the effect of art the authenticity of which there is no gainsaying. Mr. K. Ganesh has done a good job of it; he never lets down the original, at the same time he is not unduly obsessed with his responsibility. We look forward with anticipatory delight to the Tamil version of Coolie, another of Dr. Anand’s novels, which the Publishers promise in, a preface to Untouchable.

MANJERI S. ISVARAN

Abhedavadam, Rendered into Tamil by Thi. Ja. Ra. from the Original English “Bolshevism”–a Chapter in Chats Behind Bars, by Sri C. Rajagopalachariar. (Shakti Karyalayam, Royapettah, Madras. Price Re. 1.)

TROUBLES in the history of man had arisen quite a number of times when he forgot that he was related to his neighbour by bonds of labour. The thought that every piece of bread he ate was a product of the sweated labour of many never occurred to him. His ambition for competition is his inveterate disease, and his pathetic struggle for amassing wealth and winning power deprives him of all inherent sweetness. The dual nature in man is perplexing. To cite an example, we find him cooperating with his neighbour when the action in which he is involved brings him no loss. But when the question of denying to himself certain things which would serve the needs of the people as a whole is put before him he has no answer to offer. He has not cultivated that love to share and possess the products of human labour in common with others. He forgets that everyone is a labourer and no one has the natural right to deny the other what it is in his power to give. We talk of Division of Labour. We must see whether there is equal distribution of the things which are produced.

From the day of the Sermon on the Mount to the day of the Russian Revolution, man’s political, social, and economic evolution had been through several isms. In this century the various states of the world have various political ideals for purposes of administration and international relationship. Though a few of us have ceased to be nomads, the predatory instinct is still in us, the greed to aggrandise. Imperialism wears the apparel of democracy, democracy resembles an association of an intellectual oligarchy, socialism has a thousand faces looking far into eternity, and the energy of the black-market deities nourishes itself on these isms.

Sri C. Rajagopalachariar in these lectures teaches us how to live our life, how to know liberty, and how to find happiness. It is only when everyone of us becomes fully conscious of our duty to every other being peace could be attained. We must shed our self-centredness and lust for power. He wants man to evolve not through revolution, but through non-violent means. Sri C. Rajagopalachariar’s approach makes one think of the words of the celebrated Socialist, Beatrice Webb: “The good life at which the citizen aims is the life that is beneficial to all his fellowmen, irrespective of age or sex, religion or race.”

Sri Thi. Ja. Ra. needs no introduction to the Tamil public. As a creative writer and as a journalist he has made a first class reputation. In the present translation he lives up to that reputation by wielding a style, so much his own, simple, chatty, and unobtrusively informative.

M. S. GOPALAKRISHNAN