Books and Authors

The power of the word has always been amply acknowledged. Whether it was the spoken word or the written, it would not have made much of a difference in the early days. When we say “In the beginning was the word”, it must have been the spoken word. For, writing had obviously come much later.

The written word has not been looked down upon as being less powerful. If any, it had acquired a new mystique, with the quill-pen and the printing press. Its appeal has a wide range of realisation from the schoolboy, who claims that “the pen, is mightier than the sword”, to the novelist-turned Prime Minister (Benjamin Disraeli) who believed that “with words we rule men” and indeed showed that he could.

No more effective example of the impact of words, as poetry, could be found in recent times than the patriotic song of Tagore, “Amaar Sonaar Baangla”, which proved the battle cry of people of East Pakistan for the Bangla Desh to be.

Poets the world over have used words with their sense power as well as of beauty. But none of them seems to have celebrated their glory to the same lofty philosophical purpose as Samuel Daniel, the Elizabethan poet, did in his happy phrase:

Powre above Powres, O heavenly Eloquence
That with the strong reine of commanding words
Dost manage, guide and master th’ eminence
Of mens affections, more than any swords.

It was a happy thought of the Centre for Commonwealth Literature and Research of the Mysore University (now under the imaginative and enterprising direction of Prof. H. H. Anniah Gowda) that it had chosen the evocative expression: “Powre above Powres” for the overall title for its ambitious and wide-ranging publication series.

“The English tongue is of small reach, stretching no further than this island of ours”, wrote the Headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School in EDilancl in 1582. He was obviously being only factual and cautious as any schoolmaster is expected to be. Maybe a little too literal-minded, as we might be tempted to say with the aid of hindsight unlimited at this distance of time. Now almost four centuries later, this language (once dismissed as “vulgar”, in comparison to Latin and French) and its literature have spread to almost every nook and corner of the globe from James Town, Virginia, and the Carribean Islands to Africa and Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, not to speak of India and the rest of South-East Asia.

Now, the “Powre above Powres”series comprises six volumes during the last four years, covering the literature in English produced in all these countries, from Australia and New Zealand, Canada and Africa, wherever the Colonial encounter could be seen in one form or another. What exactly is common to all these countries and regions? Of course, the English language, first and foremost. And then, the historical experience, of shared values, along with a clash of ideas, transformed in the light of theirrespective traditional cultures.

Though it is true that every English-using writer draws upon the heritage of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, the problems of cultural identity, no lessthan those of time and place, make for significant differences. The kind of language used by Achebe and Naugi not only differs from that of Fielding and Scott, but from that of Maugham and Greene. Likewise, the rhythmic patterns and sound sequences as also the imagery and sources of inspiration of Judith Wright and James Macaulay are very different from those of Philip Larkin and George Barker.

As far as Australia and New Zealand are concerned, not only does the Pacific air smell different from that of the Atlantic and the North Sea, but the bush and Priarie land would give different perspective to the poet’s roving eye. It is also observed that where history and chronology are scanty, their place could be filled by landscape and ecology. There could be a kind of “confining and distorting act” in outlining the special relation between New Zealand and the New World, not devoid of an element of the fanciful and the outlandish.

The dream view of Katherine Mansfield, projected over two generations ago, could still be valid with some writers of that country:

“Oh, I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world. It must be mysterious, as though floating. It must take the breath. It must be ‘one of those islands’.”

In the Indian context, if the colonial encounter is most powerfully represented, in its social and philosophical implications, by Raja Ram Mohun Roy and his contemporaries in the early decades of the nineteenth century, who was the one whom we could identify as representing it equally effectively in its literary expression?

As far as writing in English at least was concerned (though the expression “Indian Writing in English” had to wait for over a century to be coined), it was the young poet, Henry Derozio, who was the first to catch the dawn. He not only matured young, but died young, the heir to an unfulfilled renown, rather like Keats, whose younger contemporary he was. Born in 1809, this leading spirit of young Bengal, was snatched away in his prime in 1831, before he was 22.)

Poet, teacher, inspirer of the youth, pioneer of intellectual freedom, Derozio (Henry Louis Vivian) was a romantic figure of compelling force, rather like Lord Byron, with none of the latter’s escapades among women to add to the sinister halo around his image. Comparatively little was known about his life until recently, though much of his written work, including his long poem, “The Fakeera of Jungeera”, “Song of the Hindustanee Minstrel” and other pieces had survived, along with a dozen his sonnets.

The two dominant themes of Derozio’s poetry were–the freedom of man and the future of the Indian youth.

“Who would live a crouching slave,
While yet this earth can give a grave?”

He asked in resounding tones in his poem on “Thermopylae” , striking a blow for the freedom of Greece in the manner of Byron whom he admired. “The Harp of India”, “To India my Native Land”, “Sonnets to the Pupils of the Hindu College”, would give some idea of the subjects that absorbed his attention. His conception of the student fraternity, striving for academic honours surpassed religious and other narrow boundaries that could limit the outlook of men. He hoped that:

“This will do much towards softening asperities
Which always arise in hostile sects, and when
the Hindu and the Christian have learned from
mutual intercourse how much there is to be admired
in the human character, without reference to
differences of opinion in religious matters...”

These lines may be no example of great poetry; but they certainly convey a healthy, uplifting sentiment, whose message remains as relevant now as when they were composed.

Derozio is claimed by Prof. R. K. Das Gupta (in a foreword to a recent book) to be a Bengali poet. Derozio, to him, is not one of the poets of John company: he is “a Bengali poet who wrote his poems in English.” By the same token, can we describe Sarojini Naidu as an Andhra poet who wrote in English and Nissim Ezekiel as a Marathi poet who writes in English and so on? The regional-linguistic identity seems to have been conspicuous by its absence in the consciousness of Derozio.

Why can’t we then call him an Indian poet in English, and a pioneer in his line?

In the sixth volume in the “Powre above Powres”, Prof. Jasbir Jain, of Jaipur University, provides a lot of light on the life and work of Derozio, along with a balanced assessment of his poetic merit.

Luckily for Indian Writing in English now, fewer critics feel it necessary to ask why people go on writing in English–be it prose or verse–which could be worse, according to some, with curious ideas of linguistic nationalism. Anyway, they can do nothing about it, as more writing in English is in evidence now than before India’s political independence.

The question had not only been answered, but the problem set in perspective, by Sri Aurobindo, nearly four decades ago, when he observed:

“It is not true in all cases that one can’t write first class things in a learned language. Both in French and English, people to whom the language was not native have done remarkable work, although that is rare. What about Jawaharlal’s autobiography? Many English critics think it first class in its own kind;...If first-class excludes everything inferior to Shakespeare and Milton, that is another matter. I think, as time goes on, people will become more and more polyglot and these mental barriers will disappear.

Poetry is not necessarily all of one kind. Sri Aurobindo himself could be a fine example, with his “Savitri” and “Future Poetry.” Nor do all poets need to strike a lyrical note in the old Romantic style nor evoke the surrealistic image in a more contemporary, grotesque manner? But there are many of them equally worried bout the human predicament.

Prof. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, the historian of Indian Writing in English and the biographer of Sri Aurobindo, is one of India’s well-known and versatile scholars. He has done lots of translation from the classics, but few of his admirers might have suspected him to be a practising poet. His long poem “Zero Hour,” therefore, comes as a pleasant surprise. It  is a personal reaction the modern civilisation that seems to be bursting at the seams.

The poem, in five sections, Holi, Boom-city, Walpurgis-night, On the Brink; and Retrieval and Ascent, which gives expression to feelings of anguish and frustration, is not without its ray of hope. In fact, it ends on a note of sturdy optimism.

The “boom-city” comes in for more than its due share of scathing at his hands:

A triple miracle
In the beleaguered war-torn state;
An economic explosion
A political implosion
A social revolution.

On the recipes for success for those well-versed in the ways of the world, he says:

Sneak your way to the Minister’s room
Bribe your way to import quotas
Smile your way to the cabaret floor.

When the world is in disarray, and civilisation is on the brink, what’s Homo Sapiens to do about it?

Whither shall I fly, whither?
Where, O where seek safety
For my craven individuality?
Wherever I fly the flyout follows
And myself am all Inferno’s flames
Irresistible the etheric diffusion
Unarrested the contamination.

As an educationist, of extensive experience, he gives a bit of his mind to the army of unproductive academics:

Universities are the latter-day pyramids
Where half-dead academics in resentful coma
Cultivate mutual companionship
While angry neophytes rage and tear.
The mummies have lost their immunity
And the museum-keepers their old integrity.

But the problem, according to him, is posed not at the impersonal, institutional level, but at the individual human level.

It’s the desert of the human heart that’s the problem
It’s the sterility of the human soul that’s the problem
It’s the drying up of love and compassion that’s the problem.

But, where does the solution lie? He has an unshakable faith in the power that controls the universe:

Does it not stand to reason
A power of infinite consciousness alone
Can keep this incredible universe going?

He concludes with a hope in the potentialities of knowledge and Energy:

Let the breeze of cleansing knowledge
Chase the dolorous mists of fear.
Let the currents of primordial Energy
Change the virgin-self with supernal power.

Dr. Chandran Devanesen is also a seasoned educationist with a refined poetic sensibility. He has published a number of poems over the years, grave and gay, devotional as also satirical. In the Wisdom of the Syllabus, he has a fling or two at the teachers as well as the students, whose prayer could be amusing, though understandable:

Give us this day our daily notes
Notes, notes, cacologic notes,
floating like moles in the cacodyl atmosphere
of lecture-rooms.
Notes, notes, cacophonic notes–
there is music here that softer falls
than learned lectures within four walls.

There is a pleasant dream-like quality in the short poems of O. P. Bhatnagar, collected recently as “Oneiric visions.” But dreams captured with one eye, while the other cocks a snook at you, Lyrical, yes, but salty, with a tongue-in-the cheek approach to man and nature.

A poem for him is “a framed sand-dune.” And the man who dies knows that man does not live,

“But is lived
And dies only as thoughts
In an image.”

What is the image of a Saint? Every Saint has a past and every sinner a future, it is said. Bhatnagar’s “Saint” has a familiar end, marked by an amusing irony of fate:

He preached abstinence
All his life
Keeping women away
At a light’s distance
In an absolute purity of thought.
People ensainted him:
And when he died
More prostitutes came
To mourn the loss.

Of an old friend and customer? May or may not be. Serve him right, all the same, chuckles the reader!

Very different, in style as well as in substance, is the poetry of Krishna Srinivas. He is a romantic as well as a mystic. His poems are certainly an overflow of his powerful emotions, not recollected in tranquillity, but recreated in turbulence. He is utterly unself-conscious, and totally committed, to the basic values of poetry. The sensitivity of the lyric and the grandeur of the epic are combined in his magnum opus on the five elements, which is a tour de force.

On “Water”, for instance, his verse flows resoundingly like Tennyson’s “Brook” and Southey’s “Waterfall”:

I dream with the River
.......    
I cry with the River
I grow with the River
I frolic with the River
I age with the River
I regenerate with the River......

The Section on the “Wind” literally starts with a bang, and the reader is almost blown off his feet, by the onomatopoeical, alphabetical exercise:

A Bang .......
Curling dinosaur fury...
galaxing huing inane,
Jejune kilns littering,
multitudinous nightmares opening
Parlours queer, restless sagas
torn, ubiquitous, vacuous, weird
Xeric, Yogic, Zoic.