Revive Triveni’s Quest

REVIVE TRIVENI’S QUEST

Not having even seen Triveni for a long time and reconciling oneself to that fine periodical having gone the way of all flesh, it was a pleasure to learn that the completion of fifty years of its publication is being celebrated. A contributor myself some decades ago, I had known, though not intimately, that sensitive and dedicated patriot, its founder-editor, the late K. Ramakotiswara Rau. I am happy I take part in that celebration to the extent I can by an article to Triveni'sGolden jubilee Number.

It will sound trite if one says that journalism in India was once a vocation which attracted some of our finest and most self-effacing spirits but has turned now virtually into a profession–by no means of course an indictment–and almost into one among other ways only of making a living. Not everything was lovely in the garden in the good old days, but perhaps some nostalgia for the past may be in order. With Ramakotiswara Rau it was not just a vocation–it, was, if some hyperbole is permitted, nothing less than a dedication–a self-chosen assignment which consumed his spirit and absorbed all his energies. May that tribe of such missionaries of journalism never pass away as one sometimes now to be the case!

In the years of our unfreedom we were often driven to seeking compensation for the sorrows of subjection in the consolations of historical reminiscence and reconstruction. We manufactured our own variety of pride by reflections on what, with little warrant was called the 19th century Indian renaissance. As a salve to the injury inflicted by foreign rule, we recalled our own roll from Rammohan Roy to Rabindranath Tagore, from Shah Waliullah to Abul Kalam Azad, from Ranade and Gokhale to Gandhi. From out of our storied past we sought to draw sustenance for our land and our pride about her. There was about it all a certain sentimentality inevitably concomitant with the weakness that had seeped into our character during the long years of subjugation we had suffered. But it had also a kind of strength that was in the pages of Triveni. This country of ours has borne more than her share of the world’s woes but has never lost her resiliency. The true Indian spirit, if such it may be called, has never failed to see the rainbow in the rain.

Thus it was that Triveni was ever in travail, aching to light a little candle in the darkness so that one day the Indian sky could be aflame. Ramakotiswara Rau sought single-mindedly to enlist co-operation from whoever offered goodwill and build on India’s harried, yet in many ways truly hallowed, soil a “heaven of freedom”:

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high,
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken into fragments
By narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out of the depths of truth,
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
In the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection.”

This was the vision of India, not of Rabindranath Tagore alone but of all our perceptive people –a vision that has been witness through history that India’s past was never a mere longevity. This was the vision sustaining Triveni and its founder and his co-adjutors from different levels of life in India.

The confluence of cultures that has been ourcountry should shine with a new light now that we are free for nearly decades and are moving, through trial and error no doubt and after often excruciating experiences of the infinite contradictions in the psychology of man and his capacity for magnanimity as well as for mischief, towards a better tomorrow for our long-suffering people. If Triveni revives, the journal will have its work cut out. It will have to work so that cynicism, either generated by superior intellectuality or by the propensity towards placating power and acquiescing in its abuse, no longer clogs our path, distorts development and degrades our being. This is a tall order, but Ramakotiswara Rau’s Triveni always dared and defied hurdles before which others, far more resourceful, would quail. In any case, whether Triveni emerges again or no in our cultural geography the call of its confluent waters must sound again.

If my memory is not playing me false, I wrote over four decades ago an article in Triveni on “The Challenge of Nationalism.” Even at that time I had grown into the conviction, unshaken still and unshakeable till I return to the elements, that the fulfilment of freedom–for which then we all hungered and thirsted–was in socialism, and that far from “humanity, through nationality, returning to bestiality” as some cynic had averred, the evolution of a new culture, national in form and socialist in content, would show the way, as in the Soviet Union which had transformed itself from the Tsarist “prison of nations” into what might, with some permissible hyperbole, be called a “paradise for the people.” Independent India has been going through her travails, but we are far yet from the goals of our struggle. Even after a massive demonstration (March 1977) by our people of their determination to hurl from positions of authority a once-cherished leadership that had mangled their mandate by miserable misdemeanour, there goes on malpractices, even inhumanities–there take place not one but many “Belchis,” where the vile curse of untouchability, practised in defiance of law, sullies social conduct and sanctions diabolic blackguardry aimed at perpetuating power over the traditionally deprived elements of our own people. The truly indigenous inhabitants of our land, now scheduled as tribes and dubbed “ward” so that a few crumbs of opportunity could patronisingly be thrown at them by more fortunate people, remain almost where they were, in spite of some advance indubitably taking place here and there. Lest it be thought an over-statement, however, let me put it in somewhat concrete terms and in the context of what one sees in the Soviet Union.

As these lines are being written, the World Book Fair goes on in Delihi, and Ziyat Esenbayev who leads the Soviet delegation to the fair and hails from Uzbekistan, a once ward region that has after the Revolution made marvellous strides, tells the Indian Press (and only a few grudgingly report!) that the USSR brings out one-fourth of the world’s total book production, that every minute three thousand copies of books roll out of printing presses, that there are 8,000 newspapers and some 6,000 journals printed in more than 342 million copies of a single edition, that during 1970-’75 ten thousand books from foreign languages were published in translation (their total print amounting to 360 million), that 161 books of Tagore have been published in 23 Soviet languages (6 million copies altogether), that books in the Soviet Union are cheap and text-books cheaper still (the latter, for a child’s four-year primary education, will cost no more than the price of four bars of chocolate, i.e., 4 roubles 40 kopecks), that the citizens of the USSR are the world’s most avid readers. This transformation has taken place in a country inhabited by more than a hundred nationalities, many of them infinitely more ward, before the Revolution got under way, than most of our people in India. Whatever the imprecation uttered against socialism, our own Asian brethren, Tajik, Uzbek, Turkman, Kirghiz, Kazakh, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani along with myriad others with an even crueller history of deprivation, like the Avars and the Ulchi and the Yakut and the Eskimo, have Come into their own in a new historical community, the Soviet people.

I have been, to some extent, an eye-witness to the sea-change as Tajikistan, next door to still largely feudal Afghanistan, where women, condemned to live behind the veil and to death if they defied the decrees of the mullah, today comprise more than 50% of the scientists, are found to be in such posts as that of director of the Firdausi National Library and may be found to be acting as one’s interpreter in English while being an academician (as our guide in 1969 was) with a thesis on Sarojini Naidu’s poetry to her credit! I have met and spoken to a woman minister of education of Turkmenistan SSR whose early life was spent in the bad old days when girls in a family were often looked on as too much of a burden and their death a good riddance. I have learnt of the Ulchi, on the remote banks of the Amur, a dwindling tribe facing extinction in Tsarist times but now slowly increasing (from 1000 to 2000 so far), fishing in modern boats, getting higher education, with a newly-devised alphabet of their own and in their vocabulary a word for “happiness” that they did not have before! I have known Buryat-Mongol scientists and an Eskimo woman heading a medical research institute. I have known of Chinghiz Aitmatov who writes in Kirghiz or Rasul Gamzatov who is a poet in the Avar language (spoken in parts of Daghestan) – known fairly closely Mirza Tursun-Zade (recently dead), the well-known Tajik writer and public figure, all acclaimed all over the USSR and also appreciated abroad. Many Indian M. Ps. have learnt to admire too such remarkable women as Yadgar Nasiruddinova, once head of the Uzbekistan administration and chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities, apart, of course, from seminal figures of the age like the first woman astronaut in history, Valentina Tereschkova. All this only to stress that socialism in Soviet Union, to take the example of the first socialist state, has done tremendous things in the direction of the remaking of man on newer foundations–a feat of greater moment than the fact that atomic power stations and cosmodromes are there today in the notoriously somnolent “Muzhik” land of Russia,

There is no call to think of the Soviet Union or any other country as having found the final answer to all the world’s ills. But in the context of world change, India remains fundamentally stagnant. We are such a large country, complicated, weighed down by our past, our land exhausted by ten thousand years of cultivation and our minds rendered arid by five thousand years of civilization. We cannot expect transformation, even on a mild but qualitative scale, too quickly. But how far have we gone in wiping the tear out of the eye of most of our people? Do we give a thought – by “we” is meant our so-called elite–to the Toda or the Mizo, the Khasi or the Oraon, the list could be endless! How long will “Harijans” remain no more than objects of superior pity, put in a special enclosure, as it were, while the “charity-mongering acrobats” of class society can occasionally spare them some “philanthropy”? When shall we measure up to the situation seen, for example, in the far North of the Soviet Union where the Chukchi, numbering 11,700, boast of writers like Yuri Rytkheu, admired all over the USSR and known abroad, where there are only 400 Yukaghirs but their writers, like the poet Uluro Ado, are published, one page in Yukaghir (their alphabet devised after the Revolution), the facing page in Russian so that almost all in the USSR could read it. No wonder they say proudly that on the first Polar day, when the sun does not set for the first time in the year, the universe seems to consist of nothing but light, and such indeed was the blazing light of the October Revolution.

Such things seem more significant even than the fact of the elimination of unemployment and of illiteracy and of exploitative features of social life, but of course the whole process is inter-connected. May be, we need above all to shed our ultra-prudent inhibitions, cease to be the “soft state” that we are so often told we are, plunge into truly transforming programmes, but it cannot happen just for the asking. It will not do merely to imagine that if socialism could come to Samarkand and Bukhara, why can’t it to Varanasi and Kanchi. When will our people be roused to great endeavour by a leadership whose spiritual energies not frittered away in the pettifoggeries of shop-soiled politics?

Triveni had never been a success in worldly terms, but it never ceased to dream dreams and see visions and then share the experience with as many people as it could reach. Here in our India, where the unity of mankind was earliest perceived (cf. Vedic idea:  (“where the universe is like a nest”) or man’s link with one another and with nature was stated with sublimity: (“I am the child of the soil, the son of mother Earth”), will not at long last begin a real quest for the remaking of man, the breaking of his bonds?