Masti: The Man and the Man of Letters

Sixteen years ago, Masti Venkatesa Iyengar (“Srinivasa”), then already in his mid-seventies, received the National Sahitya Akademi Award for his latest collection of short stories in Kannada. No question of late recognition, this; his stature as Kannada man of letters was eminent enough for his election to the presidentship of the Annual Sahitya Sammelan at Belgaum as early as 1929, when he was not forty yet. And he presided over the All-India Writers’ Conference at Bombay in 1961, and succeeded Dr. S. Radhakrishnan as the President of the P. E. N. All-India Centre, and continues to hold this position. Again ten years ago, Masti was elected to the immortality of Fellowship of Sahitya Akademi, and this set the seal of national apotheosi­sation on one to whom literature had been all along a vocation, a sacerdocy, a means of self- realisation. Now the conferment of the Vagdevi (Jnanpith) Award reminds us once again how tall indeed Masti is among contemporary India’s men of letters. For 70 or more years, Masti has been serving Kannada and Indian literature with sustained distinction, and he has been promoting the cause of culture and enlightenment, and radiating sweetness and light. And it may indeed be said of him that the honours that crowd upon him also attract a measure of unique honour to themselves.

After a brilliant academic career, Masti entered the Mysore Government Service, but in his early ’Fifties retired prematurely of his own accord rather than tamely subject to unjust supercession. The Maharaja, however, conferred upon Masti the title of Raja-seva-prasakta. Presently he did yeoman’s service, as executive head of the Kannada Sahitya Parishad for two terms, taking the message – the purity and power and glory ­of Kannada literature to all sections of the people all over Karnataka. For over 20 years, he edited with dedication and discrimination the monthly journal, Jeevana, which the “university wits” – D. R. Bendre, V. K. Gokak and R. S. Mugali – had founded earlier. The Jeevana Karyalaya, however, is active still, and over its imprint Masti’s own books are being published.

When Masti started writing, among his contemporaries were B. M. Srikantia (whose birth centenary is being celebrated this year). T. S. Venkannaiya, T. P. Kailasam, C. K. Venkataramiah and D. V. Gundappa. Poetry, drama and fiction flowed from Masti’s pen since the early nineteen-twenties, and to some extent set the pace of the Kannada renaissance. Kailasam found Masti’s Savitri “the sweetest play I know of.” Masti’s short stories set a standard and inaugurated an age. The greatest of these perhaps, “Masumatti” was translated into English by Navaratna Rama Rao and came out in Triveni and a Tamil rendering by Rajaji, with the title “Venuganam” appeared in Kalaimagal almost half a century ago. Later, Masti’s short stories came out in English in five volumes. Subbanna, an exquisite novelette. made Gundappa (and many others) shed copious tears. Chenna Basava Nayaka and Chikka Veera Rajendra are historical novels, of near-epic proportions. “Apart from ability, one must be a GOOD man to write a book of this kind,” said Rajaji about Chenna Basava Nayaka; and it is for the latter that Masti has received the Vagdevi Prize. The novels are not just nostalgic exercises in the remembrance of things past; they are really, clinical probes into the roots of national decadence, but done with compassionate understanding.

Masti’s non-fiction prose writings include popular Culture In Karnataka, The Poetry of Valmiki, Rabindranath Tagore, a bio­graphy of Rajaji, a play on Kalidasa, and a collection, Essays, Addresses, etc. Some of these first appeared in Kannada, and later in an English rendering. His autobiographical diversions have a flavour of their own, and tell us a good deal about him as also his contemporaries. Writers young and old have been drawn to him as filings to a magnet, for it is not only as writer and rasika, but as man too, Masti is bracing and exhilarating, and his native humanity and inveterate kindliness are almost proverbial.

No writer, however “original”, spins entirely out or him­self, and the scriptures of Masti’s inspiration have been, understandably enough, Valmiki and Vyasa and Kalidasa, Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Scott, and Bankim Chandra and Tagore and Tolstoy. If Masti’s book-length perceptive study of the Poetry of Valmiki appeared in 1940, his Samskrita Endowment Lectures on the Mahabharata came out much later. The Mahabharata is, as it were, an ocean, or all the oceans, and the earth, and the skies too, and a timid person would have refrained from compressing a discussion on the epic into two lectures. But Masti has doubled compression with total comprehension. The structure of the epic, the episodes, the kernel of the story, the characters, the ethics, Dharma­sastra, insinuated by the Mahabharata – nothing is omitted. Masti is clear-headed, forthright, lucid, instructive. And yet, as one reads the lectures, one can be a little uneasy too. Masti thinks that there are two or more versions of the same story inter­twining throughout, and also other adhesions. There is the pro-­Pandava version, the version that defies Krishna, and the version with a Kaurava bias! It is a fascinating game to try to dis­entangle these from one another, but a dangerous game as well. If you omit the episode of the outrage on Draupadi in the open court, and the Gita on the field of Kurukshetra, many would feel that the Mahabharata has been emptied of two of its most essen­tial elements. It is true the Mahabharata is huge, and scholars find it unequal in parts, with inconsistencies galore. Shall we try to reconcile the inconsistencies or tidy up the mess by a process of surgical elimination? But Masti on the Mahabharata provokes thinking and enhances our understanding of the epic.

As a creative writer, Masti often preferred to quarry in the inexhaustible riches of our classical literature, notably the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The epic characters were to him creatures of flesh and blood, perhaps more real than neighbours and acquaintances in everyday life. In his poem “Ramnavami”, a rustic waits on the roadside expecting Rama, Sita and Lakshmana to pass that way. It is Ramnavami, Rama’s birth­day – what’s there so very irrational in the rustic’s expectancy? The lie of everyday crass actuality may yet become the Golden Truth of imaginative fiction; yes, indeed, why not?

In one of his notable pieces of fiction, “An Old Story”, Masti describes an ascetic who is so conceited about his own purity and vairagya that he asks his disciple to alter a verse traditionally attributed to Vyasa: the change is from No matter how aged, no matter how great an ascetic, the pleasures of the senses attract a man” to “However old, however wise, the pleasures of the senses attract a man. The ascetic alone, they cannot attract.” How was Vyasa competent to pronounce an opinion on the vulner­ability of ascetics? The same night a ravishing woman caught in the rain seeks shelter, and the ascetic allows her to sleep in his hermitage. His equanimity is ruffled however, and late in the night he tries to open her room to steal one more look ather – but is surprised to see instead the effulgent Vyasa of the matted looks in a stance of silent admonishment of the errant ascetic. It is a story of tremendous power that insinuates Vyasa’s utter truth of perception and his infallible insight into the secrets of heaven, earth and hell.

“Masumatti” is a great story by any standard. It is not a question of bhava alone, for even the technique – it is cast in the form of an extract from an Englishman’s Diary – is superb. How is one to describe the electric quality of Krishna’s divine melody as it flowed unpredictably out of his flute? The story is about a dead painter who has left a picture of Gopalakrishna incomplete, having been called suddenly to a fight with the marauders where he had succumbed. It was after countless attempts that had proved fruitless that the painter, after meditation for several days, had come out with a new gift of vision. The trees, and Krishna on one of the branches, with the flute at his lips; a cow, with her rich udders, at some distance; an indistinctly formed figure near the cow. The unfinished picture is already touched with the magic of life – the very leaves seem to listen, the air feels charmed, and all earth is in a trance of attention and adoration. What else? The painter had hoped to show that the calf, on its gallop towards the mother-cow’s inviting udders, is arrested on its way, and turns its face towards the tree, and Krishna with his flute. The music has just begun. Being verily the milk of Paradise, Krishna’s music makes the calf forget all about the mothers cow and the udders and the milk! “It is only in India”, says Raja Rao, “that such a beautiful conception of Art can be conceived.”

In “Another, Old Story” Masti brings out subtly yet overwhelmingly the true nature of worship. Parashar’s formal “puja” is apparently perfunctory, but then he is so continually absorbed in God that he hardly notices the difference between ghee and bitter neem-oil. In “The Return of Sakuntala”, Masti attempts a sequel to Kalidasa’s play. It is this teasing thought–what happened when, after her reunion with Dushyanta, Sakuntala returned to Kanva’s Ashrama?–that imaginatively shapes itself as a fascinating tale. In an ancillary piece, “Gautami tells a Story”, the sage woman relates to Sakuntala, Anasuya and Priyamvada the tale of her own star-crossed love and of her acceptance of fate.

And another, and another. In “The Birth of an Upanishad”, Masti reconstructs with a bold sweep how, out of the seasoned observations of a venerable old Sage, his sorrowing disciples built what has since come to be cherished as an immortal Upanishad. In another story, “The Last Days of Sariputra”, Masti narrates how Narasimha Sarma came under the Sakya Muni’s spell and became Sariputra, returned to his village in his last days, and met his wife, his daughter and granddaughter; then he went, accompanied by his wife (now a bikshuni),to found a colony in Karnataka on the banks of the Godavari. There is something in Masti’s nature that makes him feel at home with Rishis and Munis, their Ashramas with their sylvan peace, their old-world atmosphere, their Gautamis and Vedavatis, their elected austeri­ties, their philosophical inquiries, their athletic contests, their storms and calms without and within. Has Masti somehow strayed from that golden past, or is he merely giving it a visible domicile even in our flawed and gnawing present?

I cannot resist the temptation to refer to one more story, the tremblingly beautiful “Sri Ramanuja’s Wife.” Masti couldn’t perhaps, reconcile himself to the traditional account of Sri Ramanuja’s estrangement and life-long separation from his wife. “I saw under a tree near the pond and let my mind wander,” he writes, “and as I sat, a story shaped itself in my mind.” Late in life, Sri Ramanuja lives incognito in a village in Mysore called Saligrama, and is well looked after by a disciple and his wife. One day a lady comes from the South, along with a companion. Having stolen a glance at Ramanuja in the dusk as he bathes in a pond, this lady finds shelter in the disciple’s house. Presently Ramanuja runs high fever, and one night he is vaguely conscious of somebody touching his feet, but when he opens his eyes, the figure quietly withdraws and disappears. Ramanuja gets well in the morning, but the lady from the South takes ill and dies. She is Ramanuja’s wife herself, and had come in Ramanuja’s trail to atone for her past folly. Having had a first glimpse at the pond, she lingers on to have a closer look. But Ramanuja falls ill, and his condition gets worse. On a night when he is alone and asleep and unattended, she goes to his bedside and prays that her husband’s fever may be transferred to her. Like Babar exchanging his life for that of his son, Humayun, here is a concordant too between the human and the Divine! Well, a contract is a contract, and so Ramanuja recovers, and his wife dies. But why is the story so moving? The “lie” of fiction has once again become the higher “Truth” of the imagination. In some other stories too – for example, “Ranganatha of White Hill” and “The Krishna Idol of Penukonda” – Masti scores again and again with the sovereignty of his creative imagination.

Once in a way, Masti ventures into “alien” pastures, as in “The Last Day of a Poet’s Life.” It is Goethe reviewing­ almost re-living – his entire past on the last day of his life, his mind going and : to the distant origins. Masti told me recently that he was trying to probe King Lear’s past, the years when his daughters – Goneril, Regan, Cordelia – made the passage from childhood and girlhood to early womanhood. For Masti, nothing human, nothing that pertains to the imaginative world, is “alien” in the least! And of course there are the many stories that probe the “present” – the contemporary social reality – and there is infallible precision and compassion in his reports charged with poetry and humour alike. “The Curds Seller” is perfect in its kind, and the Rangappa stories are endlessly enjoyable. Generally speaking, Masti’s stories hover about the delectable realm between fact and fancy, smiles and tears. Here and Eternity. Hence the sudden cloud bursts and the rain, the iridescences, and the arc of marriage between the little egos and the Grace Abounding.

We have in Masti, then, a writer of fiction who, not only responds to the laughs and heart-aches of contemporary life, but also exchanges pulses with creative powers like Kalidasa, Shakespeare and Goethe, and with princes and prelates of spiritual empires like Valmiki, Vyasa, Vamadeva, Sakya Muni, Ramanuja. It is because Masti is endowed with this kind of aesthetic sensibility, this positive capability to sense the past and the present alike, this supreme gift of identification with diverse ages, situations and characters, it is this combination of qualities that makes him a creative writer sui generis. And his criticism illuminates more than explicates, and when one is with him and listens to him, one forgets the distinction between Kavi and Rasika; one is only aware of the Masti ambience:

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

(Note: My earlier and shorter “Tribute” appeared in The Hindu of 7 April 1974.)