Chalapathi Rau

The recent death of M. Chalapathi Rau–under such extra­ordinary circumstances too!–must have come as a shock to his innumerable friends and admirers, as it certainly did to me. Our association was spread over half a century, and at our last meeting in my house in Mylapore in mid-1982, his intellect was at its liveliest, and there was no dearth of plans for the future. He seems to have written to his brother, M. R. Rao, as late as 17 December 1982:

“Waltair, I know, will be my final home but not yet. I would be there, retiring from retirement, in sound health, not as a cripple or too old.”

And, again, on 10 February 1983:

“I may be here (Delhi) for another three years to fulfil my duties with the Nehru Fund and the Nehru Jury.”

But Destiny has disposed otherwise. The race is run, the gallant heroic soul has passed away.

What can I say about Chalapathi Rau today when the mind is crowded with a miscellany of memories–when the heart is weighted with sadness–and a mere numbness creeps upon the consciousness?

It is our inveterate habit to return to the days of our youth­ – “the days of our glory,” says Byron! – in a mood of irrational yet inescapable nostalgia. Where exactly was the glamour or the glory of those days? One was an articled slave to a soulless curriculum–one’s purse was almost always empty–one spasmodically alternated between hope and despair–one was just a speck of insignificance in a spiralling dust-storm. And yet–how did we manage the daily miracle?–one felt with Wordsworth that “to be young was very heaven!” One could sip coffee (priced one anna per cup) with sly disdain and annihilate whole worlds with an impromptu epigram, or indeed even with a mere shrug of one’s shoulders. One could saunter along the Marina, nearly collide against the pillars of society on the way, discuss the Round Table Conference proceedings while reading the evening Hindu with selective emphasis, and return at last to one’s dim-lighted room to wrestle once more with one’s spine-pattered tomes and ink-stained notes. Llewelyn Powys wrote to me in 1933: “Think of your being only twenty-five! Richard La Galliene told me that, when Oscar Wilde heard he was twenty-five only, he said, ‘Richard, there is genius in being twenty-five’!” So it be, then; it is a consoling thought that at least for a brief year we all proudly handled the currency of genius.

In 1931, I was a “private” post-graduate student, rooming in Sri Venkateswara Hostel, Triplicane, spending several hours a day in the Madras University Library, trying unsuccessfully to tackle Beowulf, feeling half-reputed by its barbaric grandeur, and thus discovering an easy reason to browse among books of all kinds putting out of my mind inconvenient thoughts of the approaching Waterloo. I was then, and had been for some time, contributing a weekly literacy causerie to the Federated India and a similar page to the Mahratta. These earlier sins are heavy on my soul, but at least they kept me out of the deadlier sins. At that time, M. Chalapathi Rau was already an Honours graduate in English Language and Literature, and (if I am not mistaken) a Law graduate as well. He had a room in the YMIA building, and his window overlooked the Gokhale Hall where, evening after evening, gifted speakers bombarded the listeners’ ears and the very walls with their feats of oratory. What a providential apprenticeship for the editor of the National Herald in the fulness of time.

I met Chalapathi Rau in Triveni office, which used to be located in the YMIA building. Writing of “Old Triveni Days” in January 1955, Chalapathi Rau himself recalls: “I was introduced to him by Isvaran, over the noise of a ‘Kalakshepam’ in the auditorium.” In whichever way our friendship began, it was to endure and to contribute in no insignificant measure to that elusive thing we call the quality of life. The editor of Triveni, K. Ramakotiswara Rau, was suave, reticent, genial, and managed to conceal somehow what an effort it cost him to keep the journal uneasily afloat on India’s cultural waters. “Ramakoti” was also a literary “midwife” – as K. S. Venkataramani often called him – finding pride and delight in the discovery of “new” writers. Certainly, he discovered and launched Chalapathi’s first piece, an appreciation of the new Poet Laureate, John Masefield. Recalling the event a quarter-century later, Chalapathi was to write:

‘I had seen Triveni but today I was meeting its Editor, and it seemed a moment on which somebody’s destiny depended. He would be kind, but would he have the pleasure of discovering me, I who was well-known to myself?

He was considerate...He said kind things, something about the raciness of the writing...It was only when the article was published that I realised that the writing had been too racy, a tumble of similes and metaphors, racing beyond the point of no return...With twenty-five neatly printed reprints, I felt I was a writer.”

Chalapathi and I were both contributors to the journal, we were both in Madras during 1931-’33, and that was kinship enough to begin with. We met and talked, – oh, thought is free! Manjeri S. Isvaran, poet and short-story writer, was one of us too, and he was serious and sad, the very picture of Arnold’s The Strayed Reveller. A. D. Mani, as yet unaware of the burden of Hitavada’seditorship, shot in and out of the office of Triveni, now with the proposal to open a branch of the PEN in Madras, now presenting us with a fait accompli in the shape of a “Renaissance Associa­tion.” And there was K. Chandrasekharan, humanist, advocate and author of a collection of portraits in miniature, Persons and Personalities. A couple of decades later, I wrote an essay “We Were Seven” for the Social Welfare of Bombay recalling this group of seven writers who came together under the aegis of Triveni in the early nineteen-thirties.

At the beginning of our acquaintanceship, Chalapathi seemed a lazy, easy, care-free sort of person. But there was more to it than the seeming, for one felt also that there behind them all, lay, resilient and curled, a steely nimbleness and a steely sharpness. “Let’s go to the Restaurant”, he would say suddenly; “Let’s’ have a classical triad–a sweet, a savoury and a cup that cheers!” And there, over a cup of coffee, he would warm up and expand and scintillate. We discussed men and affairs, politics, and literature, virtues and idiosyncracies. Chalapathi was a little bit of a cynic – Lytton Strachey would have said that he was great enough to be that – and this fact (or this appearance) imparted a piquant flavour to all he said. Returning to his room, I once more scanned the walls, and I read aloud the familiar lines of Aldous Huxley’s Fifth Philosopher’s Song:

A million million spermatozoa,
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among the billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne­–
But the One was Me.
Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
Taking ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, forward Homunculus,
If you’d quietly died!

Chalapathi had transcribed the whole poem in his characteristic bold hand and hung the paper prominently. Is the Fifth Philosopher’s Song the quintessence of pessimism – or is it rather the storm­blast prelude to frenzied striving and self-exceeding? Perhaps it is both.

Chalapathi Rau was a close student of modern English litera­ture, especially poetry. His table used to be littered with Benn’s Sixpenny Poets – Edward Thompson, John Davidson, Waiter de la Mare, and several others. The books were heavily underlined, and he could recite verses with a peppery naturalness and relish. As for fiction, we talked of Cronin and Golding and Lawrence and Francis Brett Young, and brought in the more recent poets­– “Modernists, Imagists, and Futurists” about whom he had written scintillatingly in Triveni. In a word, we were young, and we loved English literature.

It was indeed extraordinary that at a time when academic surveys of English poetry were apt to stop with Swinburne, Chalapathi should have exposed himself so enthusiastically to the “modernists, imagists and futurists”–to Edith Sitwell, to Aldous Huxley, to Ezra Pound, and even to T. S. Eliot, of whom he could write superlatively in these terms:

“...the most scholastic of poets and critics ... The Sacred Wood has already become the Bible of critics who follow him, while The Waste Land is one of the great poems of the world...and in its discords, its weird music, its undying images, and the hush hush hush of its silences, it suggests the very stir of stars, the rustle of planets, and the crash of worlds.”

But Chalapathi’s addiction to English poetry didn’t estrange him from Telugu poetry, and one of his pioneering pieces of criticism-­cum-translation was “Subbarau’s YenkiSongs.” This thin little volume of songs, that had the gusto of ballads and the stately lilt of lyrics”, he wrote, “came upon us like the light of a new experience.” The sahridayais in close alliance with the student of English poetry when Chalapathi writes (Triveni, Nov.–Dec. 1930):

“It introduced the same problems in Telugu poetry as Wordsworth had introduced a century ago in England with his ‘Lyrical Ballads’, the same important problem of the subject-matter of poetry and the language of poetic expression. The songs introduced a new genre in love-poetry in Telugu...” At the beginning of 1933, I chanced upon Chalapathi Rau in the Welcome Hotel of Bombay. He had not quite made up his mind what he was going to do with himself, but he vaguely hoped to join a firm of solicitors in Madras. I had myself gone to Bombay to take an interview in connection with a teaching post in a college to be soon started, and Chalapathi advised me to shed my bohemianism and become a good boy. In plainer language, he advised me to accept the offer of the teaching job at Belgaum. Well, I followed his advice,–but that is quite another story. After that brief encounter at the Welcome Hotel, thirty-three years were to pass before we could see each other in the flesh again. But that hardly mattered. I knew of his movements from common friends–Venkataramani, Isvaran – and, ofcourse, I read his occasional articles in Triveni. There was his obituary tribute to G. K. Chesterton in the August 1936 number of Triveni, and he found the right words more than once:

“His verse, when it is not mere satire or tinselly, is the most powerful part of his output; in its intensity of tone, it thrills with meanings, and in its sweep of imagination it is capable of surprising crescendoes of fervour and music...

“He will last as a great master of the essay, as a penetrat­ing literary critic, as a vigorous verse-satirist, as a poet, above all as a personality. If he was the enemy of salutary things like Divorce reform, he was also the enemy of hypocrisy. If he was obscurantist at times, he was also gloriously       illuminating. He was never a cad or a poseur.”

But, of course, it was political writing that caught one’s attention at once. He wrote of “The Viceroys of India” and made even that stalest of themes interesting and enjoyable. Far more to the purpose was “A Decade of Indian Politics” (Sept-Oct. 1934), in which Chalapathi lashed out against the new Constitution, the joint handiwork of Hoare, Sapru and Bikaner:

“What must be clear to all is that the Native States will be the pocket boroughs and, the communal electorates the rotten boroughs which will return a surplus of reactionaries, so that it will be well nigh impossible even to move this Car of Juggernaut...

“If the Congress cannot do anything else, it might at least take effective steps to kill this hydra-headed monstrosity, this patchwork Constitution of a mob ofPrinces and a motley ofProvinces, with self-government on the circumference and safeguards at the centre...”

Sapru, however, was to warn Tiresias-like: If we don’t agree to work it (the Constitution), it will work us!

Then, one day, I learned that Chalapathi Rau had gone to Allahabad, and that my friend, Iswara Dutt, and he were running the Week-End and the Twentieth Century. Soon after, in 1937 on the eve of the provincial elections (under the new Constitution), Iswara Dutt and Chalapathi descended upon Madras, and ran the daily paper, People’s Voice, on behalf of the Raja of Pithapuram whose newly-found party entered the fray with inflated hopes and ample funds. The party was routed at the polls, and the paper folded up; but Chalapathi Rau had had his editorial innings, and the transition from Pithapuram’s to Jawaharlal’s politics – for in August 1938, Chalapathi joined Nehru’s paper, the National Herald­ – was a tonic change and a singular piece of good fortune to the country. Chalapathi’s oscillations and meanderings in the journal­istic world hadn’t apparently been in vain. He had acquired a prose style full of iridescent flashes with a cumulative aurora borealis power of fascination. He could, with hardly more than a dozen sharp phrases, “flay alive” either a pompous popular idol or a soulless Simla bureaucrat. No wonder Chalapathi fitted into the scheme of the National Herald to a nicety. The editor K. Rama Rao and his deputy, Chalapathi, were complementary to each other, and together they made a very formidable combina­tion. But the partnership ended in 1946, and Chalapathi became the new helmsman and remained in that post for the next thirty years and more.

In the early nineteen-sixties, I had a postcard from Chalapathi–breaking the silence of many long years–telling me how he had met my son, Ambirajan, at the British Museum in London, and had found him thriving. Then, in 1966, Chalapathi called on me at Waltair, in the Andhra University campus. Thirty-three years after! We had both changed a great deal, but the deeper affinity remained. I met him, over a decade later, in his National Herald office during the Emergency. “Do you see any prospect of things improving?” I asked. “I’m working for it, I’m hoping for it,” he said. That must have been a difficult time for him, but he kept his heart warm and his head cool and his vision unblurred. Once, dining at the Delhi Branch of Sri Aurobindo Ashram with Acharya Kripalani during the Emergency, I asked him how it was that one of his outspoken “Letters” achieved publication in the national press; he answered with a quizzical smile: “This was how it happened, Professor. Chalapathi Rau was bold enough to publish it in the National Herald first, and once that happened, the other papers fell in line.” But clearly Chalapathi wasn’t happy during the Emergency, and even afterwards, he wasn’t the same man again. Something had gone out of him, as it were. He had almost to speak in sighs and silences.

It was, however, during the Emergency that by a quirk of fate we were both nominated members of the Governing Body of CIEFL, Hyderabad. This gave us opportunities to meet 3 or 4 times a year, a couple of days every time, in the CIEFL campus. In the evening of our lives, it was thus possible for us to indulge in “the remembrance of things past”, balance national disappointments against achievements however flawed or partial, and give free vent to hope even against hope. Chalapathi’s last years were clouded because of the conspiracy of circumstances that forced him to leave the National Herald, and also because of the decline of values in divers segments of our national life. Writing in Triveni in June 1938, Chalapathi said, more in anguish than in anger, and still with a residual hope though not unassailed by a sense of despair:

“The ego of the nation must be developed ... There must be unity, concentration and point in that ego...

“We may love English poetry, but we cannot but hate the bacilli processes of British imperialism. And, after all, is not Gandhiji’s own illumination due to his incandescent introspection? And what is introspection but the inquisition of the soul? The nation must pass through this fit of severe self-­scrutiny. It must impose on itself this grand inquisition...There seems to be no easy path for its salvation...”

I wonder whether these words wrung from the depths aren’t even more applicable today than 45 years ago, when they were written.