Telugu Writing in The Industrial Age

By Dr. D. V. K. RAGHAVACHARYULU, M.A., D.Litt.
(Andhra University)

Industrialisation, with its increasing emphasis on urban development, and the mechanisation of the means of production and distribution, has naturally meant a disruption of the traditional balance between the individual and the society. The migration of groups and individuals from the villages to the urban centres resulted in a dislocation of rural economy based mainly on the joint-family. The new conception of function in the shape of service has resulted, along with other transforming influences, in the breakdown of the caste-system and the emergence of a vertical arrangement of classes. It is a moot point whether a distinctive proletariat consciousness, with a well-differentiated ethos and a way of life, has yet found its full, authentic expression in the arts. But an expanded and restive middle-class has arisen, motivated by tensions and resolutions peculiar to its psychology and temperament. Telugu poetry and fiction in the last three decades are almost exclusively a bourgeois phenomenon, reflecting its mental dilemma in every sphere of life.

The mass-production of books, and of printed matter, effecting a speedy crystallisation of public opinion, has created an unprecedented correlation between the tastes of the reading public and the standards of authorship. The writer, while remaining true to his own authentic feeling, has also to articulate ‘public truth’ faithfully and in a responsible manner. Conformity to public taste has led at times to the vulgarisation of art, as reflected in the growth of shady literature in its infinite variety. Our literature, on the whole, has become more contemporaneous and adequate in its realistic illusion than ever. Modern journalism, with its improved methods of printing and rapid distribution of books, has given rise to new forms like the serial novel, the skit, the card-story, the book-review, etc. The paucity of leisure and increasing time-mindedness have made miniature art-forms all the more popular. The well-built long poem is now a rarity; the lyric and the ‘Khanda-Kavya’ have become the staple forms of poetic communication. The short-story and the one-act play a direct product of the Industrial Age; and even the novel is dually giving place to the novelette. Our drama has been successfully eclipsed by the cinema, and is now mostly limited to amateur staging and competition performance. The essay, the reminiscential and introspective sketch, the scenario, the flash-, etc., have also stemmed from the new environment. The railway line has suggested a new technique of story-writing, where the writer symbolically depicts the tantalising parallelism in the thought-sequences of his characters. The post-office has stimulated the writing of stories and poems of the correspondence type. The radio has produced the ‘air-script’ and is truly creating a silent revolution in our public taste.

Apart from these formalistic changes, recent writing in Andhra reveals our easy susceptibility to the neighbourhood of ideas, thanks to the new international context of thought. The Telugu writers of the mid-twenties had departed from the purposive direction and contemporary consciousness stressed by Viresalingam, Gurujada and Gidugu. The Bhavakavis were all languishing sentimentalists who strained every stray rose into bleeding emotion; their romanticism was a revolt of solitary instincts against the bonds of the past, and, lacking the support of any movement of the aggregate, it tended to relapse into pure mysticism. Their pantheism and pessimism, and all their love-lorn melodies, appeared to be unreal and fantastic in a world of changing values and floundering patterns. ‘Sri Sri’ and Sishtla led the new march towards goals proper to an industrial set-up. Likewise, the novelists turned from their magic moonings into forgotten antiquity to the complexities of the modern world, and began preparing the minds of men for the new social evolution. Contemporary poetry and fiction have played a mutually complementary role. Poetry has become the emotive restatement of social experience, while the novel has become the medium for a searching analysis of the motivation behind human conduct, moulded as it is by the new techniques and the materialistic format. There is a striking correspondence between the reactions of the poets and the findings of the novelists.

Modern literature reflects, besides, the disinheritance of the middle-classes. The joint-family has ceased to be an economic unit and its authoritarian aspect has been questioned by the ‘young rebels’ trained in the Western concepts of freedom and individualism. The value of work, of initiative and occupation, has been upheld and ‘Sri Sri’ has even sentimentalised the concept of works:

“Who were the porters that heaved the marble that built the Taj?

Oh, don’t tell me of the King’s palanquin, but of the slaves that bore it:”

The lower middle-classes are in sympathy with the working classes, and the writers have tried to articulate the latter’s aspirations. But they are not prepared to recognise the identity which modern change has forced on their class with the lower ranks, and have, consequently, become ‘broken-minded and broken-hearted’. The plight is poignantly depicted by ‘Sarada’ in his Apaswaralu which deals with the reversals in the economic situation and the social status of individuals in various classes following industrialisation.

The same despondent dualism is revealed in our attitude to tradition. Industrialisation and technology have mixed up castes and communities, but the persistence of old loyalties to the group and the new militant sub-casteism among the historically neglected communities have retarded the growth of a homogeneous industrial society. Some writers have been pleading for a return to sanity and social certainty offered by Neo-Brahminism, for example, Viswanatha in his Veyi-Padagalu and Cheliyali-Katta and Dharma-Chakram. Tripuraneni and Tapee opposed all such regressive revivalism, but unwittingly gave rise to a different sort of sectarian communalism. Others, like Bapiraju, believed in a cosmopolitan structure of society, based on individual merit and economic justice.

Industry and technology have revolutionised our whole outlook on life, and our attitudes to men and things. In the old days a stable equilibrium between the individual and the community was provided by the Doctrine of Karma, which contained extreme personal individualism and extreme social authoritarianism within a single cultural pattern. But, with the advent of science and power in our life, the agents of creative integration are fast disappearing. The human intellect and initiative that can harness nature and transform society constituted the new reality, whereas the Doctrine of Action was apt to degenerate into one of inaction, and the belief in fatality meant a definite retrenchment of the natural human personality. The new concept of opportunity eliminated that of chance, the physical replaced the metaphysical, Revelation and Incarnation gave place to Nationalism and Evolution. For the moment, at any rate, Materialism and Marxism seemed to offer a new frame of reference for our intelligentsia, within which the ‘Progressive Writers’ were to visualise and forecast social transformation. However, what characterises the intellectual life of Andhra, and is faithfully reflected in the literature, is not the evolution of new patterns of adjustment, but the perpetual Gordian-knotting of the problem of existence and survival, and the lack of incisive responses and arguments designed to meet them. Gopichand’s Asamardhuni Jeeva-Yatra portrays the decline and fall of the middle-classes through the character of its hero, who is incapacitated for action by the modern dilemma and, having lost his moorings on life, ends in an ignoble futility which is worse than the suicide he actual commits.

This intellectual uncertainty and emotional unproductivity of life are also responsible for the bewildering multiplicity of movements and techniques in our poetry and fiction. Our poets have all too readily succumbed to literary developments elsewhere and have with much clamour and gusto imitated every new form. Realism, sur-realism, dadaism, futurism, impressionism, psycho-analysis, behaviourism, the stream of consciousness, and existentialism have all been smuggled overnight into our literature. All this would not have been possible but for the speedy diffusion of ideas through advanced technology; nor could these novel media of expression incarnate our attitudes, had it not been for the internal change necessitated by the Industrial Revolution. One sure indication that these factors have not stopped at the surface of our life, but have indeed struck deeper roots into our consciousness, is their capacity for being employed as poetic ‘properties’. ‘Arudra’ contemplates the ‘Brave New World’ of material comfort and spiritual poverty:

‘Push the button and switch on the moon,
Push the button and switch on the breeze’–‘Arudra’

The major poets of the post-Depression period have all ransacked modern science and the industrial situation to discover the new technology of poetry for handling the new emotions and states of mind. The younger generation have made bold experiments with language in conspiracy with modern life; ‘Arudra’, Byragi, Anisetti, Kundurti, Somasundar, Dasaradhi, Narayana Reddi, Ramadas, Rentala, Elchuri, Varada and ‘Ajanta’ have all tapped the new sources of perception to suggest a wide range of experience. The following ‘evolving metaphor’ illustrates how deep the technological figure has entered into the modern consciousness:

‘The train you wish to take
Is late always by a life-time;
Sick with waiting for years and yore
Blindly would you rush into some carriage
When the rag-bag luggage of your ideals
Is labelled ‘Excess’ by a pluming T. T. C.
Your ramshackle hopes in trunks arranged
Must then be shoved into the brake-van of dreams.
Maybe the train may steam off
Ere all your belongings get on board;
Better you had left some behind
In safe custody with your favourite heroes
The city you would have left for
Shall not be reached the while that you live:
“Good God! what hast Thou done unto me?”
So protest, and stay put where you are!’
‘Arudra’: The Water Clock

We find divergent attitudes to the reception of Industry and Technology in Telugu literature. While the ‘Progressive Writers’ have hailed them as signaling prosperity for all and the eventual control of power by the workers and the peasants, others, pressed by their middle-class complexes, are apprehensive of losing their separate identity in the coming patterns of life. City-life has led to a considerable impoverishment of the middle-classes, whose subsistence economy does not readily fit them into the framework of a decent urban life. The villages, too, are in a process of rapid sophistication; the ludicrous incongruities arising out of modern Ruritania trying to ape the manners of the Coketown have figured in our contemporary satire and comedy alike. The deep-seated reluctance among educated youngmen to go to their village homes has again created new tensions between the town and the village. This has become the thematic nucleus of several stories and sketches written by Narla, Gora Sastri, Hita Sri, Kutumba Rao, Padma Raju, Bucbi Babu, Bharadvaja, Anisetti and others. G. V. Krishna Rao’s novel, Keelu-Bommalu, contrasts the self-effacing sacrifice and transparent sincerity of the ideal village with the hollow egotism and rank opportunism of the industrialised town.

It is to the problem, however, of the de-personalisation of the individual himself in an industrial and mechanised society, along with the one that concerns his reinstatement and rehabilitation, that most of our writers have turned their minds. The monotony, weariness and boredom of modern life, its pretensions and attitudinisations, its moral blankness and spiritual negation, its squalor and misery and ugliness, have all been mirrored in contemporary poetry, particularly in ‘Arudra’s Tvamevaham and Byragi’s Nooti Loni Gontukalu. Here is a moving picture of the de-humanised Man:

‘Every man in a room
And white-ants in every mind;
Every man in mid-stream
And a whirl-pool in every heart;
Every man in a prison
And a gallows in every mind;
Every man in a machine
And screws and nuts in every heart;
Every man in a furnace
And a smoking chimney in every mind;
Every man in ambush
And a tiger rampant in every heart;
There’s in each heart a red, ruined grave,
A death-bed, a winding-sheet and a lipless skull;
In the giant old banyan a cavernous hollow
And in the hollow a gentle cooing dove:
Where’s the exit? Where’s the way to wing away?
Oh! where’s the bright dappled skiff
To get ashore beyond the thickening night-shades?’
–Byragi

Anisetti Subba Rao, in his lyric entitled ‘Bhayam bhayam, braduku bhayam’, has voiced the helplessness of the individual, without roots and without hope, against the grim inevitability of failure in the struggle for existence. The psychological moment is given a vivid aesthetic concretion by Rachakonda Viswanatha Sastri, in his Alpa-Jeevi. Subbiah, the central figure, is riddled with doubt and perplexity, and is horribly ingrown. Orphaned in early life, he gropes through the maze of modern industrial society for friendships he cannot make, and lives in ‘automatic hostility’ with others. He finds no purpose in a universe in which he is somehow unavoidably involved and so becomes isolated and benighted. He tries to exercise the assertive side of his personality, which is unnatural to him, and fails to have the desired ‘moral holiday’. The mechanical and routine aspects of life have made him fall ridiculously short of the final personality. He is recognisably a human ‘type’ produced by the vast dis-orientation of habits and values in the modern set-up. Similarly, the unreal existence of a rootless middle-class is fictionalised by Buchi Babu in his Chaitanya-Sravanti, which is a probing into the stream of consciousness of a traveller in a Madras tram.

Another side of our disintegrating society is presented in the stories of Balivada Kanta Rao, Pinisetti, Pantula, Padma Raju, Chiranjeevi and others. Chalam, the enfant terrible of modern Telugu literature, has, in his Sasirekha, Brahmaneekam, Maidanam and Ameena, unmasked every illusion in our respectable society. While he attacked the falsity of our conventional personal relations, he has not spared the pathology of our modern pretences, either. His revolt against modernity is a natural extension of his revolt against conventionality. His main grudge against the old sexual arrangements was that they were unnatural and uncreative. But he found that in an Industrial Society, too, the same evils were capable of recrudescing in a different form. In a mechanized society, the natural instincts of men and women become moped and their sexual attitudes artificial, repetitive and subdued. The mass-production of goods inevitably entails the mass-production of minds and morals. In all his works, he has upheld frankness and sincerity, spontaneity and creativity as the ideals of personal behaviour; and more than any other writer of his day, he has demonstrated with a steel-bright style, the dangers of total industrialisation and total technological advance to the free burgeoning of personal relations.

Such, then, are the searchings and findings of our writers. There is great forth-sight and introspection among them, but foresight and vision, and an imaginative realignment of the social consciousness in harmony with the evolving patterns of life, are yet to come. Many writers have considered the new developments as Mephistophelian: for example, Viswanatha’s Swarganiki Nicchenalu is concerned with the problem of Evil symbolised by the machine and holds out Divine Grace centred in resurgent tradition as the only hope of redemption; but it is doubtful if many readers have found a safe anchor in his thought, despite
his sinewy prose and deadly dialectic. A writer like Adivi Bapiraju, with the milk of human kindness sometimes overflowing his gentle heart, welcomes the Machine and Industry, provided there is no obligation to the ‘the Evil One’. He even sees a Promethean side to science and industry in that they make art, and the creative rest required for its enjoyment, available to the common man, and widen our horizon of experience. On the other hand, Buchi Babu, in his Chivaraku Migiledi, has attempted to attain a synthesis and a reconstruction. His hero, Dayanidhi, is Andhra to the core, deeply influenced by Chalam, Nanduri, Viswanatha and Bapiraju, and obtains a glimpse into the three faces of love in his mixed environment. He sees ‘the skull beneath the skin’ in his urban love; finds the tyrannical evolutionary femme galante in his rustic love; and finally he discovers the eternal female in his third love, who escapes this debasing dichotomy ofpersonality. It is love that belongs neither to the city, nor to the village, but to both, love that is purely elemental and innocent of all sense of guilt or guile. Dayanidhi’s dream is not fulfilled in reality; but to have made such radiant love the centre of his heart’s musings, even for a short while, is in itself an act of faith, not easily found in our deferential, incurious society. Komali remains a rune of hope in a conscience seared by the conflicts of the industrial age. The writer flees the decaying past and also the uneasy present, and aspires for a future ‘builded’ on understanding and charity. He wishes that the Industrial Revolution would be followed by a psychological revolution, when the Machine, with its many-unfolding marvels, would bring us to the kindly intimacy of Nature.

It will thus be noticed that the modern Telugu poets and novelists have reflected in their works both the constructive and the disintegrating phases of contemporary society as it is being shaped by new developments in industry and technology. They show the urgent need for attaining a new balance in life and a wholesome healing of the shattered personality of Man in the new environment. The poets are the prophets of social change and are already making eager anticipations of a hopeful future lit up by a landscape of plenty and happiness:

‘Mines are found and work is found
Factories have sprung and towns have smiled:
Lustily today the Godavari swerves into Visakha,
Full of smiles, too, the Krishna will accost Anantapur.
……………..
And look! what is left in your hands? the gay
festoon of Leisure!’
–‘Arudra’ in What a Dream!