Memories of Adivi Bapiraju

MEMORIES OF ADIVI BAPIRAZU

By OSWALD COULDREY, M.A, (Oxon.)
(Formerly Principal, Rajahmundry College)

Adivi Bapirazu joined the first year class of the College, if I remember rightly, in nineteen thirteen, when he would have been about sixteen years old, He and I were eminently what Bhavabhuti calls samana dharma;our dispositions were remarkably alike, and that in so many ways that I cannot easily remember which particular predilection it was that first drew us together. I think it must have been his delight in telling stories of his boyhood. I always enjoyed what seemed to me the romantic glimpses of old Indian country life which all too rarely relieved the dullness of my students’ essays. Bapirazu would from the first have been unusually rewarding in this respect. But it was his oral communication of such fare that I remember better. A delightful talker in every way, and a sworn lover of country life and country lore, he was especially a born story-teller, with a remarkable gift of reminiscence. He lived with zest and with equal zest remembered. Heaven, he said to me once, is remembering our pleasant times. This from a sage of less than twenty years! What a pity that he never lived to write a book of pure reminiscence such as a poet writes in age. It might well have been his best book, for I doubt whether the best of him ever got into his books. Many of his casual memories it is now my own turn to remember. He told me once how nearly we came to never meeting at all. He had a cousin who resembled him from babyhood, and once after a family festival the two mothers unwittingly exchanged babies. The mistake was only recognised because his mother presently missed her baby’s anklets. More personally revealing was his account of the habit he developed rather later of stealing from (I think) his grandfather’s bed to watch the midnight shadow plays or ‘Skin-pictures’, that delightful old Asian equivalent of the now too, too Western movies. His grandfather always knew where to look for him. A ‘Skin-picture’ fan myself, I tried later to persuade him (and to persuade my friend the Editor of Triveni to persuade him) to write an account of that early love of his, with coloured drawings by his own hand of those traditionally ornate and glorious transparencies of leather, those two-dimensional and radiant effigies of the stately Rama and the terrible Ravana and the nimble Hanuman. What more endearing epitome and memento could we have desired of the later poet and painter, with his abiding devotion to his country’s tradition as enshrined in the poetry and picture and music of the Andhra folk as well as of their social betters? Alas, it was never to be written,–I feel sure that he meant to write it. I cannot believe that he ever grew ashamed of his earliest idolatry and its innocent object, as I suspect that too many of Mr. Ramakotiswara Rau’s readers were and perhaps still are ashamed of those lovely untouchables. I say perhaps, for I wonder if any ‘Tolu Bommalu’ fellowships in Andhra still survive the competition of their all-conquering Western counterpart.

A good example of Bapirazu’s gift of happy childhood reminiscence is the account of an old-fashioned Brahmin wedding which I have incorporated almost word for word (for it arrived opportunely in a letter) in the marriage chapter of my South Indian Hours (P.223). There are many other traces of him in my writings, I recordedin the same book his impromptu comparison of a certain recurring type of September raincloud to a Nagaraja with expanded hood, and another of Pampas plumes beside Godavary to clouds seen from a mountain top at dawn; these promising now not the story-teller but the poet. The story of Balakrishna in my Phantom Waterfall collection is an artificial amalgam of two true episodes, the setting a sketch of him in action from life, the rest an experience of his in his own words which came like the wedding in a later letter. The sketch illustrates several characteristics of the future poet and painter; his love of images visible and invisible, of playful myth-making, of swimming. The first and last at least I shared with him. He gave me the Nandi which he found in the river and I still have it (but it is of copper not of silver). The stone Venugopala from Bhuvaneshwar he managed to retain. To finish with my larcenies, the first verse of the poem “To his Friend beside Godavary” in my Sonnets of East and West is a literal translation of a Telugu verse of his written on a Christmas card about 1917. This card has also a drawing of an allegorical maiden. Such handmade Christmas cards I used to get regularly about that time and earlier from the Damerla brothers and Varada Venkataratnam also and still have several. But Bapirazu’s alone bore original verse. The second verse of my poem is my own and was prompted by an inexplicable cessation of his letters to me in England. I did not know that he was then in prison for too rashly airing his patriotic sentiments. Otherwise in the twenties we wrote to one another astonishingly often as it now seems to me. In the thirties the exchange began to flag and later became spasmodic, but it never died away. So after all the Sacred River never had to freeze.

It was from these handmade Christmas cards suggested no doubt by those of Ram and Varada, that I first noticed the promise that was in him to draw as well as write. He had not Ram’s ¹ visual grip, but his delight in pictures and picturing and general inventiveness led me to think that he might succeed painter in a less naturalistic manner than that which attracted Ram, and I suggested that he should learn to draw in the archaistic manner then favoured in Bengal. When the Bengalis later sent an educational art mission to the South he remembered my suggestion and followed it, how happily is known to all. I mention this the more gladly for an amusing reason. When my book on South India was published in 1924 no less a person than Sir (as he became) William Rothenstein spoke of me to his students as “the man who misleads the Indians”. I heard this at the time from one of the said students, now a painter of distinction. Now Sir William can only have heard of an obscure pedagogue of ‘the benighted Presidency’ like me from the Bengalis, perhaps through Mr. Havell; and the Bengalis can only have heard of me from Ram when he once paid them a visit; and Ram can hardly have told them more of me and my connection with painting (for there was little more to tell in words) than the fact that I had helped him to join the Bombay School of Art. So my misleading of the Indians boils down to this! How deeply it rankled in Calcutta (for in those days there was sharp rivalry between the two Schools) appears from Mr. O. C. Gangoly’s amazing outburst against both Ram and me as many as ten years later in a letter to Triveni when it printed my recollections of Ram (see the three issues of Triveni from January to October 1931). That I had in the meanwhile atoned in a measure for my earlier perversity by sending another disciple to a colony at least of the Calcutta School, perhaps itself sent South to counteract my baleful influence, had evidently not redeemed my character. I hope these memories of that other disciple will not elicit a like protest from the other direction.

Towards the end of my time in India I used to employ someone to read to me after dinner to save my eyesight, and for a time Bapirazu shared this job with another reader. The two were supposed to come on alternate evenings, but it seemed to me that Bapirazu too often persuaded his partner to take his place, forI do not remember that he ever took his partner’s place in return. His partner was an obliging youth and a Christian²; I hope that Bapirazu made it up to him in other ways. Ourreading when the truant did come was not always very diligent. Sometimes he tried to improve my Telugu, but oftener we talked, instead, of everything under the sun.

In 1916 both Bapirazu and Damerla Rama Rao went with me to Ajanta. Ram was already studying art at Bombay, and we picked him up at Manmad. We rode fromJalgaon in pony carts, Ram riding in mine forhalf the way and Bapirazu forthe other half. We spent several adventurous days exploring the caves. Our first visit was made without a guide, and we found the most famous of the painted caves heavily padlocked. We made violent but vain assaults on the first of these defences to confront us. This was at the famous Seventeenth cave, and Bapirazu attributed the violent rainstorms by which our whole sojourn was thereafter interrupted and endangered (for we were never sure of being able to ford the torrent) to the Nagaraja guardian whose chapel is immediately below, and whose dank and ancient sanctity seems to pervade the valley. Standing overawed once in the vast and secret gloom of the largest (No. IV) of these subterranean halls, “What a place,” said Bapirazu in a conspiratorial whisper, “for a Home Rule meeting!” He and I rarely talked politics, whereas Damerla Venkata Rao and I were always sparring. But Bapirazu never disguised his ardent patriotism or softened the expression of it formy benefit. With what regretful gusto would he recall the lost excitements and glorious expectations aroused in his childish bosom by Bepin Chandra Pal’s agitation, and describe the precocious activities and schemes of himself and his schoolmates, of ten years ofage and under, in furtherance of the cause. I wish I could remember the details of this crusade of the children. It would have made a delightful chapter in that book of childish memories which he seems never to have written. He would end by lamenting what at the time seemed the flagging of those earlier hopes and ardours and descant upon the faith that removes mountains. This phase of his recollections always brought to my mind (indeed he may himself have quoted) Wordsworth’s equally nostalgic memories of the incipient French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that day to be alive.’ But, for Bapirazu, that day was to return.

After seeing Ajanta our party separated, the two future painters returning, well primed with Directions, by way of Ellora (which I had seen the year before) while I went on to Sanchi.

In the following April we visited Bhuvaneshwar and spent several days exploring its many beautiful old temples. This time Ram’s elder brother and his cousin Kavikondala, the Poet, came too; altogether quite a little galaxy of talent, One day I came upon them all swimming together in the lovely little old stone tank of the Mukuteshwara temple. They seemed rather abashed, as if they were afraid that I should join them; for we had been amusing ourselves by imagining a plot to smuggle me into the great Rajalingam temple disguised as a Cashmiri pundit. Another day when I was laid up with a chill (in high April!) the four of them walked without me the six miles to Undavilli to see the famous Jaina caves there. Another day Bapirazu, favoured by heaven as usual, found in a field a small stone sculpture of his favourite idol Venugopala, clearly a last priceless fragment of a lost twelfth century temple. This we carried away and it must be still among the treasures left by him. That same year or the next he and I cycled up the river from Bezwada to Amaravati. The story of what we saw there, and of the Naga which we nearly overrode on the way ; and which may or may not have followed us to Rajahmundry, is it not written in the later chapters of my South Indian Hours?

I do not remember that Bapirazu ever played tennis or even turned out for hockey, but he was as fond of swimming as I was, and as much at home in (and under) the water. We used often to bathe together from Naga-lanka in the early morning. I like to remember that I taught him the sidestroke which was then unknown in those parts and which he mastered at once and used with ease and power. In the dry spring season we and the Damerlas often went for an evening sail in a hired nawa, and once at least when the waves rode higher than usual we all dived overboard in a race with a fisherman who had expressed anxiety about safety of his boatload of distinguished landlubbers. But the pleasantest to remember of all our swims were those we had at all hours of the day from the borrowed staffboats in which our little company used to make the journey to Pattisam ³ and the gorge whenever we could seize an opportunity. I have three drawings which I made of Bapirazu (in April 19I8) on one of the last of these expeditions. I sent him a copy of one of them only last year. It shows him trustfully sleeping in the forest like the youthful Horace. He thanked me for this in the last letterhe ever wrote to me–indeed it was sent to me by his daughter, the poetess after his death–and enclosed a lyric on it which must have been one of the last he wrote. Of one of the other two sketches I am sending you a copy.

ADIVI BAPIRAZU
(From a sketch by Prof. Couldrey)
PATTISAM APRIL 1918

The young poet’s delicate beauty and lively sensibility would have made him an invaluable heroine in ourelaborate pre-war productions of Shakespeare, but for these he came too late. As it was he made a convincing Olivia in a scene from Twelfth Night which we were able to stage with other such unambitious ventures during the first World War. I never heard that he ever developed the histrionic talent which he showed on this occasion, but it must have been useful to him in public recitations of his poetry.

¹ Damerla Rama Rao.
² He was a brother of Miss Kaveri Bai.
³ A small temple on the top of a hill in the bed of Godavary.