V. N. Bhushan

V. N. BHUSHAN ^l

Poet, Professor, Critic

(Lecturer in English, B. M. College of Commerce, Poona)

V. N. Bhushan is no more! The full implication of the news I read dawned but slowly on me. Memories of V. N. B. crowded in mind as the morning paper fell from my listless fingers.

It was in 1937. We crowded in the compulsory B. A. class, agog with excitement and expectation that a new professor was to come to lecture to us. As I settled down with the nonchalance that only an undergraduate can assume, being too sophisticated to show my excitement, a portly figure, rather Chesterton-like in proportion, as he has himself put it, entered. There was the usual scoffing and jeering... some bencher whispered, ‘Dr. Ambedkar,’ and then the Professor slowly ascended the dais, glanced once at the class and began in a low tone, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am expected to lecture to you on modern poetry. Unfortunately, the book is prescribed for general reading...” Here the words were punctuated by a smile and then followed a few neatly worded sarcasms at the University for prescribing a hook of poetry for general reading. The class responded with a laugh–that agreeable noise “like a thousand bees at pasture” clearly showed that half the battle was won. Class-control, the nightmare of many a new professor was to be a sweet dream to V. N. Bhusan. And soon the Professor launched upon a rapid survey of modern poetry, thus lifting us soon to the higher, ethereal regions of Mount Parnassus. The victory was now complete; V. N. B. had beguiled our ears and captivated our hearts.

But he was to do more. To my utter surprise he called me after a week or so and asked me to contribute an article to the College Miscellany. I was flattered. This was a rare experience. Never before had a professor stepped down his pedestal so easily and naturally and broken the barriers that separated the teacher from the taught. This was only a prelude to many a long afternoon and evening that I was to spend at his small but artistically furnished flat, with the pictures of literary luminaries looking down from the walls, lined by bookshelves. I literally drank deep at this fountain of poetic imagination and literary fervour. Prof. Bhushan impressed one as much by his keen interest in English literature as by the ardour with which he spoke about literary problems and personalities to a mere ‘undergrad’. Truly, if a University id formed by an association of the teacher and the taught, here was the true University born. Even in the star-studded English Department of the Wadia College of those days, that boasted of such luminaries as Professor G. H. Kelkar and K. M. Khadye, Bhushan shone with a radiance all his own. His enthusiasm and ardour were unequalled and he had a unique gift of inspiring others with a like spirit. Bhushan was a very successful teacher. He has very ably outlined the difficulties facing an Indian teacher of English in his article on Lafcadio Hearn: “The task of teaching English to Easterners is fraught with many difficulties. Through the medium of a language not our own, we have to be acquainted with and initiated into literature alien to us in every way. The barriers of race and the differences in national tastes and temperaments are indeed difficult hurdles. It is not everyone who can surmount these and make the teaching of English a success.” It washis love for literature and literary problems, coupled with an ardent desire to make his students share it, that made him a successful teacher. If his style at times smelt of the lamp, it was relieved by flashes of his poetic imagination that enlivened the dead matter of a mere learned exposition. A romantic at heart, he was at his best in teaching such authors as Charles Lamb, Shakespeare, and the romantic poets.

As a critic, Prof. Bhushan will be remembered chiefly for his championship of Indo-English literature. To the typical objection of sceptics who cannot understand why Indians should write English poetry, his answer was, “If you understand Indians teaching English, you must understand them writing English.” In his review of the Indian contribution to English Poetry published in the British Annual of Literature in 1939, he says: “The worst of all these handicaps (of Indian writers of verse in English) is the crusade against the poets for their sin of writing in English. The Indian crusader has to remember the fact that centuries of attachment and appreciation has made English almost our tongue, and that it will be our loss if we forsake English language and literature,” and again, “The question of the possibility of Indians achieving sufficient mastery over English to enable them to be successful writers of verse in the language is now an exploded myth. The writings of some of our common countrymen in the past, as well as in the present, are eloquent answers to the charges of glib-tongued critics.” And yet be strongly opposed the view put forth by some ‘Anglophiles’ to make English India’s national language. I remember his vigorous attack on such a view when he presided over a lecture by a certain eminent member of the Servants of India Society.

He brought a very keen, critical mind to bear on literature and literary problems, and his miscellaneous critical essays cover a very wide range of subjects, where he handles almost all the varieties of criticism–comparative, historical, interpretative and appreciative. One of his most significant and original contributions is his illuminating essay on “Elia on Childhood and Children” in which he very successfully brought to light the many observations of Lamb onchildhood and children. Another essay of great merit and originality is his “A possible Poetic Retort”, contributed to the Humata (Bombay) in 1939, where he has with great scholarship convincingly put forth the hypothesis that “Browning intentionally intended his Rabbi Ben Ezra to be a sort of reply to the supposed epicurean gospel contained in Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.”His “Pegasus in Caps and Bells–A consideration of Light Verse,” shows his keen appreciation of the sprightly humour of light verse. His exposition of Shelley’s personality and poetry shows him to be a master of appreciative criticism. His style in these essays varies according to the subject. At times it has extreme simplicity and directness while on occasions it glows with poetic fervour and throbs with emotion.

But Bhushan was much more than a painstaking scholar and able interpreter. He was himself a great creative artist “a poet worthy of the privilege and burden of poetry” and as such had won the highest meed of praise from such authorities as Tagore and Sorojini Naidu, Edmund Blunden and Lawrence Housman, Ernest Rhys and John Galsworthy, to mention only a few. In many an intense lyric he sings of the “colour-fed glory and gladness of life” and donates the reader with a vital thrill of divine delight. Bhushan is a lyric poet par excellence. He has keen sensitiveness, insight, originality of expression and a gift of couching noble thoughts in honeyed words. Starting with an intrepid faith in his self appointed mission,

My pilgrimage shall be a scented flame on earth
To kindle the beacon fires of Goodness, Beauty, Truth,

the poet hopes, “though alone but undaunted, to be a shaper of his times and tendencies of darling dreams and daring deeds...a charioteer of the Juggernaut car of vital spirit and vernal song.” Many of his lyrics where he sings of Radha-Krishna remind one of the colourful charm of Sarojini Naidu. Bhushan’s originality consists in giving a poetic description of the thought realm of a poet, the seedling ground of many a noble idea. At times, through the splendid symbolism of the ‘White Bird’ or the ‘Song of the Tree’ the poet speaks of his dreams and deeds–the inspirers of his pure pulsed songs. At times more directly, he speaks how oft a wizard mood of mystery comes over him (Transcendence):

In those ripe red moods,
With half-unshuttered visions streaming by,
And delicate wonder mists dissolving
In the Saffron-laughter of the spirit–

the poet beholds the unmasked undertones of life, and then,

The half known and the yet unknown
Shed their mystic aloofness once for all,
And leap to life with the language
That knows not the contradictions of ephemeral things

As a true romantic, his muse soars “far above the slush of the world’s sordid realities”; his sensitive “soul escapes from the body’s deathcold clutch” into the final Reality to touch life at an exceptional altitude. Many are his lyrics in which he sings of Man, of Nature, and of God. God to him is a mystery, though

Man made God after his own fancy and faith
As an emblem of his power, prestige and gratitude.

He ever abides a mystery–or else he is no God! In a charming poem ‘Processions’ the poet sees a marriage procession threading its wa1 through the busy streets and from the opposite side a funeral procession:

“In between the narrow space of the two extremities
God strides up and down with a rapture all His own.

If one of the secrets of great poetry is memorableness, Bhushan has a number of lines, which, according to Dr. S. Iyengar, are “compact of beauty and hence one loves to repeat aloud”, lines like:

Far above the slush of world’s sordid beauty...
The sceptred symbol of hidden romance...
Ventriloquist moans of the gurgling world...
An argosy of magic merchandise...
A wonder-sense of sweet womanliness...

One has only to read lyrics like ‘The Pilgrim’, ‘Fallen Gods’, ‘Confidence’, ‘Snow and Man’, ‘Lesson’, to realise with Mr. V. de Sola Pinto that “Mr. Bhushan is a lyric poet with real vision and originality and gives English poetic forms a new charm and freshness by adapting them to the expression of Indian imagination and mystical thought. Mr. Bhushan’s poetry opens up a new field of vision for the English mind and deserves to be better known in Europe.” I can only close this personal tribute to one who had been “a friend, philosopher and guide” with the hope that somebody worthier than I would take up this task of spreading the ‘exotic strangeness and exalted thought’ of Bhushan’s lyrics and thus enshrine him among the elect.

^l V. N. Bhushan: born at Masulipatam, 16th July, 1909; passed his B. A.from the local Noble College; post-graduate student at Banaras Hindu University where he took a double first in English Literature at the M.A., Professor of English in Wadia College, Poona from 1937 to 1945. Principal, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s College of Arts from 1947 till his death on 13th October, 1951.

Works: Poems–Silhouettes (1928); Moonbeams (1929); Flute tunes (1931); Star Fires (1932); Enchantments (1934); Horizons (1937); Foot-falls (1938); Dramas–Anklet Bells; Samyukta; Mortal Colis: Anthologies–The Peacock Lute; The Moving Finger; and a number of miscellaneous critical essays and annotated texts.