Journalists as Literary Artists

The tyro set to launch himself into the tantalizing world of Indian (English) journalism of today will certainly do well to go by the advice, “live always in the best company when you read.” He has God’s plenty to lay his hands on when he wants to read but one is not sure if he has any models to go by when he puts pen to paper. Professional competence there is but distinctive literary craftmanship is scarce. The all-pervasive sense of hurry and hustle smothers the sparkling phrase and the purple patch. And more to the point, there is no inducement to pursue excellence in writing when there is a steady, not wholy inevitable, degeneration in the study of English as a language. The politician with his false pride, fumbling with his papers and speaking in Hindi at the United Nations, is a symbol of this degeneracy. Even if there is nothing slipshod about much of present-day writing, there is about it a certain colourlessness and a marked lack of coherence in thought and consistency in style. If there is no distinctive style, it is no good looking for the man behind a piece of writing. One does not search for the black cat in the dark room when it is not there.

The aspiring youngster of the early decades of this century was a lot more fortunate than our tyro. He could look for his mentors and seek to light his candle in their lamp. He might not have succeeded fully but he would have gained through sheer perseverance a sensitiveness to language. He would have imbibed a passion for the best that is known and thought in the world. With men of sweetness and light as his idols, he would have cultivated a refined taste. Two of them, who had, enriched the pages of “Triveni”, are entitled to our remembrance as the journal puts on a diamond - studded crown.

No two men presented a greater study in contrast than N. Raghunathan (N.R.) and M. Chalapati Rau (M.C.), though both distinguished themselves as journalists non-pareil, each in his own way. Raghunathan was the elder of the two by 15 years and passed away in October 1983, five months before M.C.’s death. Nothing was so typical of them as M.C. making his bow with an article in “Triveni,” in the early Thirties, on John Masefield, and Raghunathan translating into English the Valmiki Ramayana (in three volumes) in the Eighties.

If M. C. chose to call himself an “atheist, socialist and vegetarian,” Raghunathan left no one in doubt that he was a traditionalist and an individualist. If the one, with his atheistic propensities, had no use for the Vedic lore and the Puranic tales, the other set much store by them and lost no opportunity to proclaim the values they embodied. If the one upheld, out of his socialist convictions, the importance of state regulation of produc­tion and distribution, the other would brook no interference by the State in individual activity. (“A pluralistic society is the indispensable safeguard of democratic freedom”.) If the one favoured trade unionism even among journalists belonging to an “intellectual” profession, the other tirelessly, and in the teeth of opposition argued for professional independence from any kind of “ism.” Both differed in their temperament, outlook and ideology. But both had a common ground as students of English literature and had a rare mastery of that language. Their writings had an astonishingly wide range, spread over the crucial decades of India’s freedom struggle, and both earned a secure niche for themselves in the history of Indian journalism.

The writings of both in the newspapers to which they were attached for the major part of their lives, “The Hindu” in one case and the “National Herald” in the other, were anonymous though discerning readers could easily detect their hand. Raghunathan reserved all his resources of wit and sarcasm for his weekly column “Sotto Voce” in “Swatantra” (and later “Swarajya”) under the pseudonym “Vighneswara.” He wrote the causerie for thirteen long years, almost without interruption, from 1946 to 1959. While making the timeless topical and fitting ancient saws into modern instances, he sought “to examine current ideas and developments in the light of those basic purposes and abiding values that one finds if he cares to look behind the superficies of modern life in the age-long culture and way of the Indian people.”

Chalapathi Rau, too, wrote a column, though not at a stretch over long years in the “Hindustan Times”, the “National Herald” and the “Shankar’s Weekly” under several pseudonyms, notably as “Magnus.” His forte was satire and he drew liberally from his prodigious knowledge of European and British history. If only to illustrate that journalism need not be just “literature in a hurry” and journalists need not be looked upon as “just journeymen”, three aspects of their writings may well be examined, namely their attitude to prose, poetry and the profile art.

Raghunathan had a rather exalted view of the “other harmony” of prose. A great prose style, according to him “renders the murmur of the spirit as purely as it represents the panoply in which it is set.” For him, the essential elements of prose were “architectonics based on fundamental brain-work, the rainbow hues of emotion and the undertone of spirit communing itself as in a dream! It caught “the continuous echo of a living voice with its individual timbre, strength and virginal integrity.” He would agree with Sir Herbert Read that prose was constructive or logical with thought preceding expression but would reject out of hand Sir Herbert’s view that metaphor had no particular relevance to it.

Raghunathan himself wrote in a dignified style, neither “light and easy” like Addison’s nor “majestic and sonorous” like Johnson’s. He scrupulously stuck to the English idiom and syntax – “not for us such royal rifling, mere plebs”–and had a sense of balance and harmony. There was a classical touch about his writings, and he imparted something of the euphony of Sanskrit to his lines when he dealt with subjects purely of art and literature. He was rarely “penny plain” and could be a source of endless delight or despair when he chose to wrap himself up in the Roman toga of Marcus Aurelius or play hide and seek behind the imposing of Sir Thomas Browne or call to his aid “Anatomy”. Burton. But his quotations had an unlaboured felicity ‘about them,’ an unbought grace. They elevated the familiar look the swelling emotion at the flood-tide and clinched the argument.

There are two distinct phases in Chalapathi Rau’s writings–Rau the youngster of the Thirties and Rau the veteran journalist of the – Fifties and the later years. “The pen prances” was a favourite expression of Rau’s and it did when he was cutting his journalistic tooth. There was a raciness in his writing which made the reader almost breathless. He was richly allusive, diving deep into history and literature, ancient and modern, at Greece and Rome, of mediaeval Europe and Victorian England. He fed himself, as he said of Churchill, on a strong diet of Macaulay and Gibbon, and he wanted to write with Macaulay’s “swaggering sententious­ness.” with history as the ground. He did it all his life with this difference that in his later years, similes and metaphors never “tumbled down” from his pen and the “deep rhythm roll of thought never broke into words of embroidered foam.”

“I have not found books in running brooks,” Rau said and found K.S. Venkataramani’s “simile - studded” English strange. He himself wrote in a hard, gritty style, avoiding poetic touches. Rau had acquired, wrote Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, “a prose-style full of iridescent flashes with a cumulative aurora borealis power of fascination.” The fascination was there till the end of his days but one missed the “iridescent flashes.”

Raghunathan was a classicist in his approach to and apprecia­tion of poetry, drawing his inspiration from that pure well unde­filed, the Ramayana. Pure poetry, he held, to be the supreme type of that art which executes before it thinks. “It is the spirit that moveth where it listeth; the poet is but a medium, the reed through which the wind blows producing elfin music. The perfect poem exists in essence in the depths of his subconscious, waiting for his liberating voice just as the Adam lay buried in the blueveined Carrara for Michael Angelo’s liberating fingers.” He believed that it is only the poet that has the profoundest intuitions and that a language lives and renews itself in its poets as plantain does in its shoots. With a rare perception of the subtleties of poetry and music, he made a clear distinction between the two, the one as the product of poetic imagination and the other, of musical imagination. Each worked within its own laws and conventions.

Chalapathi Rau, if anything, was a modernist in his attitude to poetry. When he was a young man of only 23, he wrote in “Triveni” one of his arresting pieces on John Masefield, a revolu­tionary poet honoured with the Poet Laureateship of England, in 1931. Ramsay Mac Donald was then in office and M.C.’s sympa­thies were wholly with the Labour Party. He wrote exultantly of “King John”: “Masefield strikes one at first sight as the poet of the gutter the cabin, the bye-street, the race-course, the shadows of the underworld, and the sunshine of the open fields; he is of the very stuff and spirit of the cabinet representative of engine­-drivers and coalminers, of the men with too weighty a burden, too weary a load, of men who had faced the wolf at the door and known naked hunger and starvation.” Of the quality of Masefield’s poetry, Rau pointed out that he had “taken experience in clutches and lit up the tunnels of the dark world and made it as real and human as the romantic renderings of other poets; but most of all he has brought down poetry from the clouds to the running road and the open sea.”

Rau’s penchant for the unconventional and outre is again seen in his second article in “Triveni” of the Thirties on Nanduri Subba Rao’s “Enki Paatalu”. He is happy that Subba Rao had “broken the of tradition with one fierce wrench.” Rau sets out that “-breaking” process this way: “The songs introduced a new genre in love poetry in Telugu. They are mainly the expressions of Nayudubava in amorous gasps and delirious delusions giving tongue to his passions and sensations. Here is a new type of lover. The conventional lovers of Telugu poetry who indulged in breezy love­making had contracted into wooden and lifeless types; they yawned and spoke ponderous phrases, but had made Telugu poetry tedious and monotonously conventional with all its wealth of imagery where scene followed scene in traditional rococo fashion and allusions floated like icebergs in an ocean of mist. They were good artists too in kissing; everyone of them lotus-eyed and broad-shouldered and long-armed; as in Homer every dawn is rosy-fingered and every hero swift of foot. To these forms, dead, half-dead and dying, Mr. Subba Rao brought the freshness of a new experiment. He made his ‘compatriots realise the sweetness of Spenser without his sensuality and the dash of the ‘Ballad of the Nut-Brown Maid’ without its archaisms. He achieved a directness and simplicity with a frugality of phrase that was astonishing, he is comparable in this estimable quality to Mr. A.E. Housman though the latter’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’ is quite different in theme and style.”¹

Consistent with his iconoclasm is his lively analysis of “Moder­nists, Imagists and Futurists.” In this essay he lets off a dazzling cracker as it were in celebration of the “bursting horizons” and the breaking up of the frontiers. He is enthusiastic about modern poetry: “Modern poetry is not soul-stirring but it wakes up con­sciousness; it is not gnomic or divine; it has either much sound and fury or sound and sensibility. It is all cameos and silhouttes or all dots and dashes. It is not only an ironic criticism of life but a criticism of the poetry that has gone before.”

Portrait-painting in literature is as old as Plutarch’s “Lives” (first century A.D.). The short journalistic profiles of the “Pillars of Society” and of “Priests, Prophets and Kings” were of British origin but journalists in India were not slow in catching up with the best of the English writers. But the Indian profiles have generally tended to be either panegyrics or verbal fusillades.

M.C. was one of those who took to pen-portraiture with much enthusiasm. He revelled in writing about all men of importance. As one who was drawn early to the centre of the Indian political stage, he had opportunities of observing the national leaders at close quarters. He had few heroes among them and by tempera­ment, he could not have played Boswell to any Johnson; and there were no Johnsons either. He chose to concentrate, generally, on the warts of his subjects and hauled them over the coals. However, in his book, “All in All” his acerbity is on a low key.

Rau is at his best in his sketches of British Prime Ministers and writers and the Viceroys of India. As a counter-poise to Churchill’s devastating attack on Bernard Shaw the “Jester”² he holds up Shaw as “an outstanding dramatist, a thinker whose thought will be weighed and whose assertions will be quoted, a pioneer of British socialism and, more than that, of social justice, and a truly great man.” In his portrait gallery Churchill has a prominent place and his essay on “this genius without judgement” is a tour de force. Conceived on a wide canvas, Churchill is viewed in a historical perspective, the style is vivid and vigorous and the judgement incisive. Right from the beginning the essay grips one’s attention. The opening paragraph reads:

“Mr. Winston Churchill’s greatness is not compelling, for it has too much flamboyance of soul and clangour of sound, and there seems little to provoke an Indian to attempt an estimate of the greatest Englishman of the age who has been also the greatest opponent of Indian freedom. But Mr. Churchill is a personality without being an eccentric, and exploration of such vividness can be an adventure into the insular but spacious spirit which has made England English without making it European. To delineate Mr. Churchill is not to paint a portrait on a postage stamp; he seems to need a wide canvas and a modern Rembrandt. He cannot be glamorized for he is no glamour boy; he is too rubicund and Johnsonian and has the symmetry of Westminster or the Cathedral of Cologne.”

Raghunathan, as a journalist, never attempted a profile of any man in authority or in the limelight; he did not, however, spare any when public interest was jeopardised or the person concerned was hypocritical. When individual freedom was threatened or fundamental principles of public conduct were violated, he swung into action firing his ten-pounders. He had had, indeed, no political heroes.

Nonetheless, Raghunathan chose for his charming cameos saints and scholars, Good Samaritans, writers, musicians and obscure men who lived quiet but dignified lives. In exquisite language, he held them up for our reverence or admiration:

Of Sri Ramakrishna:

“Compassion at one pole, renunciation at the other, that is the axis that bridges the entire arch of experience. Love is the energising centre. It was this passion for completeness that drove Sri Rama­krishna to experience in himself, as far as that is humanly possible, the infinite modes of Ideal Being.”

Of Saint Tyagaraja:

“The mystic state, of which it was said, ‘I and my father are one,’ normally favours silent communion. But Tyagaraja the Nadopaasaka, remained on the threshold, weaving matchless patterns on the loom of music to body forth the beauty that possessed him. The order, the measure and the mysterious joy that throbs at the heart of creation are the attributes of his timeless song.”

Of Dwaram Venkatawamy Naidu:

The quiet mastery of his bowing owed much to European technique. But the firmness and purity of outline and the encrusted richness of his quarter-tones were all his own.”

Both Raghunathan and Rau were great intellectuals. Raghu­nathan was a greater scholar in the strict sense of the word. While Rau, to borrow the definition of an intellectual from Nirad Chaudhari, “formulated his conclusions which he believed to be true, and communicated his ideas to his fellowmen with a view to influencing their minds, lives and actions,” Raghunathan harked to the past and affirmed the eternal validity of the values of our immemorial culture. Though both happened to be journalists by profession, they never ceased to be students of literature and distinguished themselves as first-rate literary artists.

REFERENCES

¹ For a balanced critique of “Enki Paatalu” see Dr. D. Anjaneyulu’s essay on the subject in his book “Glimpses of Telugu Literature”, A writers Workshop Book (Price Rs. 100.)

² Churchill wrote: “Few people practise what they preach, and no one less so than Mr. Bernard Shaw. Few are more capable of having the best of everything both ways. The world has long watched with tolerance and amusement the nimble antics and gyrations of the unique and doubleheaded chameleon, while all the time the creature was eager to be taken seriously. Saint, sage and clown; venerable, profound and irrepressible, Bernard Shaw receives, if not the salutes, at least the hand-clappings of a generation which honours him .... as the greatest living master of letters in the English-speaking world.”